Windows 7: emails being received with weird characters

I'm receiving some emails in outlook 2010 with weird characters...for example - "Make this year Golden� " I'm not sure what's causing it. It's only happening in certain random emails. Has anybody seen this before. I made changes in the spell check settings in outlook and that didn't help. I'm not sure if this is due to font or what...

Are these emails coming from people you know?
If not, do emails appear ok from people you do know?

Regards,
JDobbsy1987

the emails are coming from a user i do know yes.

It could just be that your contact has copy-pasted the text from elsewhere; sometimes different applications become confused when copied text is pasted into them, and this most commonly occurs with symbols. The original message may have been "Make sure this year is Golden!"

Less likely is that your computer doesn't have the necessary font packs installed to support the displayed text, though this is a slim possibility because not only would it not be able to display most/any of the text, it would also be displayed as plain rectangles to signify an unknown symbol.


Perhaps just ask your contact what the message said originally? :P