if your mail is typed in UTF8 while the other side is reading in GB2312, gibberish will result. check with the encoding format your friends use to open the mail.

i'm not very sure abt the difference between encoding and charset. but i think, ideally, if everything is encoded with UTF8, no problem will occur.

i typed in GB2312 and my friends also use GB2312 to view~
how comes? and i try to sent e-mail to myself, other e-mail account, also result gibberish now~ 555555555555.........

if you have problem reading your own round-trip mails, it might mean the mail is corrupted in transit or the encoding has been altered.

SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), which is the key behind e-mail communication, was NOT designed to handle modern complication of encoding/charset issues. Therefore, a lot of the e-mail gateways out there will simply truncate the 8th bit of each byte in your message, producing nonsense thereafter.

Whichever e-mail client that you are using, try to check your e-mail's encoding (not the encoding that you typed in), and set it to "quoted printable," which is most accessible if both parties are based on Windows OS.