By default, Microsoft Office 2003 includes support for a number of languages. This means that when you're in Microsoft Outlook, you can read or send messages in these languages. When you receive a message, Outlook knows which character set to use to display the message because the recipient's e-mail program marked it with a language encoding. Likewise, when you create, forward, or reply to a message, Outlook will encode the message.
How Outlook encodes messages depends on which version of Microsoft Internet Explorer you're using. With Internet Explorer 5.5 or later, Outlook evaluates the text in the message, automatically selects the encoding that can display all characters in the message, and then marks the message with that information. However, for some languages, more than one encoding can display its character set. In this case, Outlook uses the preferred encoding that's specified for your computer. With versions of Internet Explorer earlier than 5.5, or with other browsers, Outlook automatically marks the message with the preferred encoding that's specified for your computer instead of selecting the encoding based on the characters in the message.
Sometimes the preferred encoding won't work for a specific character set. In this case, you need to change the encoding for that specific message. For example, if your preferred setting is Western European and you want to send Greek text, you need to select Greek (Windows) to manually apply the encoding to the message.