The email message may come in an unknown encoding. A similar problem can occur when viewing a web page. In all such cases, the encoding can be determined either manually, by the selection method, or automatically.
Instructions
Step 1
When viewing a web page, enable manual encoding selection in your browser. The corresponding menu item may be called "View" - "Encoding" or similar (its exact name depends on which browser you use). Try all available Cyrillic code tables, as well as two Unicode encodings: UTF-8 and UTF-16 (the latter is less common). Be sure to then switch your browser back to automatic code table detection.
Step 2
To determine the encoding of the text of the message received by e-mail, when using the web interface for this, proceed as described above. If you are using a mail program, copy the text of the message to the clipboard, place it in the Notepad editor, save it to a file and open this file with a browser. After that, you will be able to view it in various encodings.
Step 3
You can also use a more feature-rich text editor instead of Notepad that can view text in various code tables. They are selected in it in the same way - through the "View" menu, or directly in the file open dialog. On Windows, install Notepad ++, and on Linux, Geany or KWrite is most likely already installed.
Step 4
You can also check the file encoding in the office suite OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Office Word. To do this, save the file in TXT format and then try to open any of these packages. Immediately after that, a dialog for selecting a code table will appear on the screen. If it turns out that you made a mistake in choosing it, close the document and try to open it again, this time choosing a different encoding.
Step 5
None of the methods described above will help if the document was subjected to multiple transcoding during delivery, and you do not know its order. In case the text is not confidential, use the web tool, the link to which is placed at the end of the article. First, try to decode the document in the "Easy" mode, and if the automatic detection was not successful, experiment with manually choosing the direction of the transcoding in the "Hard" mode.
