What's with the ampersand?
 

I've lately had a lot of email returned as undeliverable, the reason being that somehow "& l t" is added to the beginning of the email address. In addition there are certain occasions which I haven't been able to isolate where punctuation marks turn into gibberish starting with an ampersand, e.g. I think that & # 8217 ; s the problem.

I have been using incredimail because the kids like the fancy paper backgrounds, but I'm beginning to suspect it may be the problem. Anyone know what this ampersand code is all about and how I get rid of it?

Hmm, that's interesting. It self corrected as I posted here, so it obviously is some kind of readable code and not gibberish. I'll edit with spaces to show what actually has been coming up.

[ 10 February 2002: Message edited by: Binoculars ]</p>

try sending your self one first or even more times that will tell you which end the problems at. maybe , and i mean maybe

The "gibberish starting with an ampersand", &#___, is just the way that HTML encodes Unicode (i.e. extended character set) characters. It is appearing because you are trying to send E-mail containing non-HTML characters as HTML, so the converter is converting them to Unicode.

HTML2.0 only includes a limited character set. &# 8217 (split up so that this BB doesn't try to reconvert it!), for example, is the Unicode symbol for a "Right Single Quotation Mark". This is not a displayable character in ISO 8859-1 Latin 1, and is not part of any HTML standard - it will be displayed differently in browsers on different platforms.