I'm trying to read a message but it looks garbled. What happened?

Following are the most likely reasons that a message may appear garbled or unreadable:

• The sender had a problem sending the message.

  On occasion, disruptions in the sender's email client or mail server may cause a message to appear garbled or unreadable.

• The message includes special characters.

  Due to the wide variety of character encoding available, you may only be able to read certain types of character encoding.

  Are you seeing garbled characters? If so, we recommend adjusting your browser's character encoding setting. Here are instructions for the most popular browsers:

  Internet Explorer 6.x

  1. Click the View menu.
  2. Select Encoding.
  3. Select the appropriate language or character set.

  FireFox 1.x

  1. Click the View menu.
  2. Select Character Encoding.
  3. Select the appropriate language or character set.

  Safari 2.x

  1. Click the View menu.
  2. Select Encoding.
  3. Select the appropriate language or character set.

  You may need to restore the original character encoding setting to view other web sites properly. If you’re viewing a message with mixed encoding, unfortunately only one character encoding set may be viewed at a time.

• The message appears as intended.

  In some cases, it may be that a garbled, unreadable (or "artistic") message was the intention of the sender. If you feel there is a possibility that this is the case, you may want to contact the sender for further information.

If none of the above suggestions apply, then it may be that the message became corrupted in transit for other reasons. This happens very rarely, but when it does occur, it most often involves attachments or images included in the body of the message. In such a case, the best solution is simply to request that the message be sent again.

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