Chris Reich

MPNews supports messages written in any character set, including non-Latin ones such as Cyrillic and Far Eastern character sets. However, this relies on the newsreader posting the message correctly identifying the character set being used. Outlook Express commonly does not do this.

If you find that messages you are posting are not being displayed correctly, there are a few things you can do to change the way newsreaders display your messages.

 a.. Ensure your messages are posted in MIME format. Outlook Express handles posting messages in different character sets much better when using MIME format. To set up Outlook Express to use this format, select the Tools Options... menu item and select the "Send" tab. Click on the "Plain Text Settings..." button and choose the "MIME" message format. Leave the "Allow 8-bit characters in headers" option switched off.
 b.. Select an appropriate default character set for reading messages. If you already have messages to read that do not correctly identify the character set they use, you can switch Outlook Express to use the correct character set by default. Select the Tools | Options... menu item and select the "Read" tab. Click on the "Fonts..." button, select the encoding you want to use and click on "Set as Default". Click on "OK". Click on the "International Settings" button and select the "Use default encoding for all incoming messages" option, and click on "OK" again.
 c.. Use the web interface to post messages. Messages posted through the web interface to your newsgroups provided by MPNews will use the UTF-8 character encoding, which can handle characters from around the world. These messages can be read correctly in any compliant newsreader or through the web interface.
 d.. Use a compliant newsreader. Other newsreaders handle different character sets bettern than Outlook Express, for example Thunderbird.