OL2002: E-mail Message in Japanese Plain Text Is Unreadable

In Microsoft Outlook 2002, when you send an Internet e-mail message in Japanese plain text, some recipients cannot read the e-mail message because of garbled text.

This problem can occur if the following conditions are true:

• Microsoft Outlook is configured to use a Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) server.
• The POP3 server or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server is not a Microsoft Exchange Server computer. The POP3 or SMTP Server is a UNIX e-mail server (for example, sendmail) or another kind of e-mail server.
• The e-mail message contains more than 36 double-byte character set (DBCS) Japanese characters in one paragraph in the body of the message.

When you send a Plain Text e-mail message to a POP user or SMTP user, Outlook 2002 encodes the body part with the Encode Intelligently feature. With this algorithm, a lot of Japanese plain text e-mail messages are sent with Quoted-Printable encoding.

UNIX and other e-mail servers in Japan cannot decode Quoted-Printable encoding. Plain Text/JIS is the most common format in Japan. Therefore, the e-mail servers cannot read Japanese e-mail messages from Outlook 2002 users.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Office XP. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: The Japanese version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later: After the hotfix is installed, the following files will have the listed attributes or later:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 1.