Hotmail email text changes to Chinese

[chopemon]

Hey,

Every so often a friend and I will be emailing each other and after getting a few emails deep into a conversation all of the body text of previous email will turn into Chinese.

Any idea why this is happening and if it means our accounts are compromised? It only seems to happen with one person.

Cheers!

[randombs]

If it's just the one person, it's probably their email client. The Chinese sounds like an encoding cock-up to me and your client or browser is showing those symbols. I've had similar situations using Firefox where it'll show random Chinese(or other language) characters, or weird squares, when it doesn't know what language encoding a page is using.

I doubt anything's been compromised. Start a brand new email to them, see if you can send as plain text instead of HTML, and ask them to see if they can reply as plain text as well and see if it happens again.

Which email company do you use, and is it via webmail or a client(iPhone, etc)?

[chopemon]

It is Hotmail, we're both using it on a PC browser and I'm on Chrome, not sure what he's on.

I guess at some point the body text gets large enough and one of our clients formats it weirdly and then the other spits it out as Chinese.

[kryss]

Make sure you are both using unicode. I'd agree with Billy about the text-encoding being the issue.