I keep seeing an odd symbol in email. What is it?
If your email contains a weird symbol (an umlaut over a lowercase y, followed by a lowercase b), you may be wondering if aliens are invading your email and news readers. Yes! The alien in question is called Microsoft Outlook Express version 5.0. With many rich features, Outlook Express also seems to have run into a compatibility problem with the way certain information is being formatted. It is not a harmful symbol and you can just ignore it if you are able to view your messages properly. Unfortunately, there is a major problem when Netscape news readers try to read this information. Not only do they get the alien symbol, but they can’t see the body of the message! At this time, I am still researching a solution to the problem. One possible workaround is to ask your email friends to use plain text when sending email, but it is obviously impossible to ask people on public newsgroups to do this.
