I've had 'garbled' looking emails turn up from time to time (particularly due to the world-wide nature of TimeSnapper support) and it makes my eyes glaze over.

"Ah encoding" i say. "I'm an expert on this. Let me think." And then I realize I'm not an expert. The mind is utterly blank. It's very zen.

I try not to think about encoding too much, if ever. I remember reading this 'joel on software' article about it "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" and i understood it all perfectly at the time. It made such sense, it was beautiful.

But then i hit the reset button on my brain and forgot it all. I've read it again since. But again, the reset button.

So when a garbled message turns up at gmail, the wisdom of joel spolsky is not upon me. I look at the screen in a panic, and bash at the "more options" link (to the left of the date received). At that moment, one of the 'options' given says "message text garbled". Yes, that's the one.

I press that link and the email opens in a new window. It's in a non-proportional font. Very raw looking. But perfectly readable. The encoding problem has magically gone away.

So gmail user's remember this alone:

If you get a garbled looking message, hit the "more options" link, and start fishing around for a suitable option. You'll soon find it.