Preset Message encoding

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Level 1

4 points

Preset Message encoding

Since I live in Greece, and most messages I receive are in Greek, I wonder if there's a way to preset the Message encoding (i.e. Greek-Windows). Such a feature would allow me to send all my mails without wondering whether my Windows-based recipient would have any problem reading them.

Is there really any Terminal command or a way to add an entry to a specific preference file?

Thanks in advance for your informative replies,

Theo

MacBook Pro 17", Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Oct 22, 2008 3:06 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,036 points

Oct 22, 2008 8:02 AM in response to theob

Such a feature would allow me to send all my mails without wondering whether my Windows-based recipient would have any problem reading them.

Of course you can avoid wondering by just doing it manually for every outgoing message via Message > Text Encoding > Greek (Windows). If that is not on the list, go to system prefs/international/languages and add ελληνικά using the Edit button.

To make that the default outgoing encoding you can try the terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "WINDOWS-1253"

You can check whether it is working by doing View > Message > Raw Source on your sent messages.

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Answer 2

theob Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 22, 2008 11:21 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom,

Obviously, the use of menu commands was the way I ensured that all my messages written in Greek could be read from a Windows-based mail client! 😉

The terminal command you posted is THE way to deal with!

Do you really believe there's a catch for changing the default outgoing encoding?
How do I really change it back to default?

Theo

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,036 points

Oct 22, 2008 11:50 AM in response to theob

Do you really believe there's a catch for changing the default outgoing encoding?

No. But whether it will always work and give the results you want I don't know.

How do I really change it back to default?

I think you can just replace the Windows-1253 by ISO-8859-1.

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