Mr Red.

If you're reading email in IE, and probably with most other browsers, there is a "languagish" setting at View | Encoding. In IE at least, it's usually set to "Autoselect." Sometimes when you visit a site that uses a "different" encoding the automatic feature turns on a different encoding (like Central European - DOS instead of Western European Windows). In automatic mode, the setting sometimes will stay wherever it flips to until individual characters that appear don't have a proper character in that encoding. "Proper" doesn't necessarily mean intelligible in this case.

You may just need to set back to a more common selection (in IE, Western European Windows is usually good). Leaving (or placing) a checkmark at the "Autoselect" entry is probably a good idea for most users.

(In IE, the autoselect goes in the order different encodings are listed, so you can drag them to a different order to make it less likely that one that causes a problem will be selected automagically.)

There's also a setting in IE at Tools | Internet Options on the "General" tab, Languages button. Your selection there could have been "bumped" to accomodate a different language than you normally use.

If either of these has been changed, your "strange characters" may be just from your browser trying to "do better" and not quite "getting it right."

John