A friend called to ask me if I knew a place that printed post cards, with Cyrillic letters. At first I didn't understand, so sent him over to a Russian e-card site.

I remembered that back a long time ago I had sent a few e-cards myself. So I dug through the email archive and pulled out that e-card site. A few hours passed and then when I came back to the computer I started perusing old emails, for fun. And do you know what? A rather important email I sent using the webmail interface of my email provider had the wrong character encoding. Arggh!

A charset of ISO-8859-1 makes for some fine looking Cyrillic — they're all question marks! It took me over nine months to realize my error, and I feel pretty stupid. Oh well, it happens to the best of us.

For your reading pleasure, here's the body of that email. Any idea what I said?

?????? ?????! ? ???? ??????????! ??? ? ????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????? ????-???? ????????, ?? ???? ??????? (???????) ?????, ? ????????? ? ??????????, ??? ???-?? ?? ??? ????????? ? ????? ?????. ????? ??????? ? ?????????, ??? ??? ????? ? ?????. ?????????, ??? ??? ???? ????? ????? ??????. ? ??????, ??? ?????? ??????????? ?? ????????? ? ????? ????? ? ??? ???? ??? ??????. ? ?????! -???? PS ??? ??????, ? ???? ? ????????. ???, ??? ????? ?????? ?? ?????????? ????.