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RouchieFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Symbols in HTML emails not displaying correctly

When I open HTML emails in Outlook, I am noticing that some symbols are appearing correctly.  In particular, the English pound sign £ appears in the email as #

When I view the source code the pound sign is display correctly (although I believe it should be £ like in HTML, right?).  Is this a problem and can it be fixed?
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David Lee
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Hi Rouchie,

Save one fo these messages to the file system in HTML format and try opening it with IE.  Let me know if the symbol shows correctly.

Cheers!
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AndreDekolta

Hello Rouchie!

Outlook email not showing (HTML) images:

See: http://www.slipstick.com/mail1/html.htm

Andre...
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ASKER

Hi BlueDevilFan
No luck.  In both IE and FireFox the £ sign shows as #

This is a new PC so I expect something isn't configured correctly...
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Hang on wait!  If I then view the source code of the saved message, Outlook has actually changed the source code to # instead of £
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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war1
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war1
That has solved it, although it took me a while as the View > Encoding option is not present while previewing.  Outlook's help file claims this problem happens when the sender's email program does not stamp the message with the correct encoding information.  It had defaulted to US-ASCII for the decoding, which I changed to Western European (Windows).

Is there a way to stop Outlook defaulting to US-ASCII in the future?
Rouchie,

Glad changing the encoding fix the problem.  This default is set automatically based on the Regional Settings (system local settings) of your operating system. The default setting appears in the International Options dialog box. (On the Tools menu, click Options, click the Mail Format tab, and then click International Options.)

Reference: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/ha010549341033.aspx
War1 has given the solution so this is just a comment.  Since the symbols didn't show up properly outside of Outlook this isn't an Outlook problem.  It's really an IE issue.  Outlook uses IE internally to display HTML formatted items.  
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But it was Outlook that saved the file as a HTML file and corrupted the symbols in the process wasn't it??  The raw code in notepad shows # signs.
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Congratulations war1 on your latest points milestone :-)
> When I view the source code the pound sign is display correctly
If the source code was showing the correct symbol, then Outlook didn't corrupt it.
Thanks, Rochie!  You put me over 6 million points mark.  :-)
Congrats, war1!
Congrats war1!!!
Thanks, BlueDevilFan and Andre!