Detect and convert encodings

ConvertEncoding enables reliable detection and conversion of encodings.

2025-11-19

The history of encoding began long before IT. Even the first alphabets were attempts to translate spoken language into visual symbols. Whether cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or the Latin alphabet, every culture developed its own systems for encoding information and preserving it across time and space.

With the advent of computers, encoding became a technical challenge. Characters had to be translated into bytes, resulting in over 140 different character encodings that modern operating systems and frameworks still support today. ASCII, ISO-8859, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS—each encoding has its own characteristics and limitations.

Unicode was and is a milestone: A system designed to represent (nearly) all characters in all languages. Unfortunately, even Unicode is not a universal solution. It exists in several variants (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32), with and without BOM, and with partially incompatible implementations.

HTML makes it even more complicated by distinguishing between internal encoding and external encoding.

The free and open-source PowerShell function ConvertEncoding, part of Set-OutlookSignatures, makes the powerful and also free and open-source library UTF.Unknown really easy to use.

ConvertEncoding enables reliable detection of encodings via BOMs, HTML metadata, and heuristic analysis, and converts content to other formats as needed. Even HTML files are correctly adjusted, including meta tags. This makes different encodings easy to manage.

🔗Interested in learning more or seeing our solution in action?

Contact us or explore further on our website. We look forward to getting to know you!

2026-04-08

🔗 Custom attributes and calculated data in email signatures

Most of the information used in email signatures comes directly from your directory service. But what about the data that doesn’t have a predefined field?

Most of the data that appears in email signatures is already available in your directory service. First and last names, job titles, phone numbers, office locations, company names, and even reporting lines are typically part of Exchange, Active Directory, or Entra ID by default.

That works well as long as...

2026-04-02

🔗 Are You Missing Out on the Most Overlooked Marketing Channel?

Company email signatures are viewed thousands of times each day. Learn how they can be managed and used more effectively as a communication channel.

A communication channel that already exists but is rarely managed

Every organization sends emails. And every email includes a signature.

Sales conversations, support replies, project updates, quotations, follow‑ups — all of them leave your organization with a visual and textual impression attached. Yet in many companies, email signatures are still...

2026-03-18

🔗 Why build new infrastructure just to manage signatures?

Set-OutlookSignatures runs on your existing systems, does not bring new dependencies and does not transfer any data externally.

Many solutions require new servers, connectors, or email rerouting. Set-OutlookSignatures doesn’t:

Runs on your existing systems No new dependencies No external data transfers Simple, secure, and scalable, without the overhead.

This is made possible by architecture developed from practical experience for practical use, with a focus on work simplification and...