Numerically encoded Cyrillic e-mails

[J.W.]

Ottawa (Canada), Friday 20/5/05 14h55 EDT

Dear SEELANGers,

I'm having a problem reading incoming Cyrillic e-mails from one of my
correspondents.  In his recent e-mails each Russian letter is replaced
by "&#" followed by a number between 1040 and 1103 (inclusive).  I've
managed to figure out the code -- 1040 to 1071 represent capitals in
Cyrillic alphabetical order, while 1072 to 1103 represent lower-case
letters, respectively.  But decoding, especially of more than one or two
sentences, is a slow process indeed.

FYI, I use an eMac on OS9, and receive Yahoo mail through Netscape
Communicator 4.77.  My correspondent uses a PC and a Yahoo e-mail
account.  He is Russian but lives in America.  I have no problem reading
most Cyrillic-encoded messages from other correspondents -- those with
either Macs or PCs.  And up until a few weeks ago I had no problem
reading this particular correspondent's messages either.  And he is
still able to read my Cyrillic encoding (Cyrillic Windows-1251) with no
difficulty.

Occasionally I do receive e-mails in which most of the letters are
replaced by other Cyrillic letters -- again, I've figured out the code,
but again, decoding is slow, although I've got more accustomed to it
over time.

Incidentally, I notice my search/replace feature in Microsoft Word uses
the same numeric code (with a ^u before the number instead of &#), and I
have discovered how to make that work, at least for finding words or
short phrases in a Cyrillic text in Word.

Questions: (a) Does anyone know why this problem might be happening in
my e-mail and is there anything either my correspondent or I can do
about it?  (b) Specifically, is there any kind of software available
that will change a numerically-encoded text into the corresponding
Cyrillic characters?  (Of course I could search and replace one letter
of the alphabet at a time, but that would take far too long -- perhaps
there is a device that will do this for all the letters at once?)

I'd be grateful for any help, either on or off list.

(Mr) J. Woodsworth
E-mail: vanya1v at yahoo.com

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