Mail to Outlook users garbles International characters

I am running OSX 10.4.1 and Mail 2.0.1.

When I send mail to Win Outlook/Outlook Express users using UTF-8 encoding they cannot read my International characters (åäöÅÄÖ). They show up as garbled chars.

In 10.3 Mail mails created with "Rich Text" always defaulted to ISO-8859. This have now changed to UTF-8 when sending mail with attachments or formatted signatures with graphics included.

Why doesn't Mail encode International chars correctly. Or rather: why cannot Outlook/ Outlook Express users see my International characters? Is it Mail 2.0.1 or Outlook that's responsible for this?

If I use "Plain text" setting in Prefs it works (ISO-8859 encoding) but I want to send formatted text and HTML links in my mail and signatures.

Posted on May 19, 2005 6:53 AM

39 replies

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,058 points

Sep 6, 2005 9:47 AM in response to Doug Dunston

Doug -- Thanks for your test messages, which look fine and should not cause problems at the other end except in odd cases. I suggest you make sure Hungarian (Magyar) is on the list in system prefs/international/languages (use Edit button to add it if not) and to try, after composing, using Message > Text Encoding to select ISO Latin-2 or Win Latin-2 and see if that works better.

Sep 6, 2005 2:05 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Dear Tom,

thank you so much for your answer. I'll send a test message to you tomorrow.

So I have to change my provider?

When I change the sending to Plain Text, I have the problem that links which I write in eMails are not getting to clickable links in M$ Outlook (Express).

I have some stupid costumers which don't know that they can copy and paste the link in the browser. 😟

Best regards an thank you again!!!
René

Sep 7, 2005 7:19 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi Tom,

I continue having the problem with some recipients. This is an example of the text they receive (but not everyone!);
...de rÃ©aliser la rÃ©servation du vol international, il me faut votre numÃ©ro de passeport avec nom et prÃ©nom correspondant.Pour le paiement, je vous communiquerai mes coordonnÃ©es bancaires ( compte SociÃ©tÃ© GÃ©nÃ©rale en France). Le pass Lan Chile n'est pas intÃ©res...
It's really a problem with the specific accents, whether in French or in another language. I hope Apple does something about this because I'm getting tired of it.
Cheers,

Mark (mantagua, Chile)

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,058 points

Sep 7, 2005 7:49 AM in response to Mark Dannau

Mark -- If you set your browser (view > text encoding) to utf-8 you will see that the texts you have posted here are perfectly fine. If your recipients can't read utf-8 mail, they are probably using old software with very limited capabilities. For such people you just have to set Message > Text Encoding to ISO Latin-1 and use Plain Text rather than Rich Text.

Sep 18, 2005 7:20 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thank you, Tom -

The Windows Latin-2 encoding seems to work better than other options. Success with Yahoo on their end.

Doug

Oct 6, 2005 12:36 PM in response to Klas Ahlin

Since i changed to UTF-8 i got a new problem.. I can´t se ÅÄÖåäö in some mail i recive. Just one newsletter that has the problem. Worked fine before. All old Newsletters are also effected.

If i look in the source of the mail i can se this:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes; format=flowed

So it seems that i can´t read mail encoded in WINDOWS-1252 anymore. Is there any way to fix this??

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,058 points

Oct 7, 2005 7:30 PM in response to Johan Kjellman

So it seems that i can´t read mail encoded in WINDOWS-1252 anymore. Is there any way to fix this??

Have you tried going to Message > Text Encoding and selecting Western (Windows Latin 1)?

In any case, setting the default encoding to UTF-8 should have no effect on incoming mail.

Nov 15, 2005 9:03 AM in response to Klas Ahlin

After additional testing the conclusion is that Mail
MUST be forced to use same (UTF-8) encoding for both
plain text and HTML sections in a mail. If this is
true Outlook users will read International characters
correctly in mail composed by Tiger Mail 2.0(.1).

This is done by first closing Mail app, open Terminal
and then type:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset
"UTF-8"

Then fire up Mail and in Preferences -> Composing
choose "Rich text" and "Use the same format as the
original message".

All mails now composed with mixed content of rich
text, graphics, attachments and International
characters will be properly presented for Windows
Outlook/OE users. Now all MIME sections will have
UTF-8 as encoding.

THANKS A LOT Klas !!! This worked for me too !!!

Nov 17, 2005 7:06 PM in response to Laurent Drion

I hope that Klas' solution will work but I haven't received any responses yet, but I wondered how we could access to Tom Gewecke's info, since the links are broken after they updated this site?

It would be nice if Apple could create some extra option to handle this in a simple way, like the one for sending Windows-compatible attachments. As it was mentioned here; OE is the de facto e-mail client for such a vast majority so although the error lies in how it handles text, there's nothing to do about that...

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Mail to Outlook users garbles International characters