characters with accents incorrectly displayed

This solution works for me, but everytime i open a
new mail i have to reset the text encoding to

UTF-8.

is there a way to de it by default?

See this note for ways to do this:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/woutlook.html

Hi Tom
I tried this, but when i close terminal and reopen Mail, it returns to automatic text encoding.
am i doing something wrong?


Thanks,
barolo

I tried this, but when i close terminal and reopen
Mail, it returns to automatic text encoding.
am i doing something wrong?

What you are looking at is not relevant and doesn't matter. Please read this part of the note again, which addresses that point:

"Also you cannot tell what is happening to the encoding of your outgoing mail by looking at Message > Text Encoding. It will always say Automatic or Default (unless of course you change it manually) even when you have set this to something specific in the Terminal. In addition, Mail > Preferences > Appearance > Default Encoding is only for incoming messages, not for outgoings."

"To check whether your mail is being given a uniform encoding, do View > Message > Raw Source on the message in your Sent folder and check to see if all the "charset=" statements are the same (there should normally be 2 of these in a rich text message)."

If in fact Fix B does not solve your problem at the other end, try Fix C.

Thanks for your tip to alter mails text encoding via terminal.
(defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8")

Could you please tell the terminal command to reset mail to its default ("Automatic") setting?

Replacing UTF-8 by ISO-8859-1 should accomplish that I think.