Setting the character encoding on an AIM account

[willywag]

I'm using an AOL Instant Messenger account with Pidgin. Occasionally I'll get
a message from someone that gets replaced with the error message:

(There was an error receiving this message.  Either you and {screen name}
have different encodings selected, or {screen name} has a buggy client.)

This happens when people copy and paste things from Microsoft Word with
smart quotes in them, and so on. Now, the people who send me these messages
generally have no idea what a character encoding is, or even what a client
is, buggy or otherwise. I'd be happy to change my character encoding to suit
them, and I can probably guess which encoding they're using (based on their
operating system, etc.) but I can't find an option to do that anywhere in
Pidgin's interface. I also don't know the details of the AIM protocol to
know which encodings it can or does use.

I feel like I must be missing something blindingly obvious here. Can anyone
help me out?

Thanks in advance.
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Setting-the-character-encoding-on-an-AIM-account-tp24420227p24420227.html
Sent from the Pidgin Support List mailing list archive at Nabble.com.