Problems with international text in Mail 2.0
Some users report that people trying to read their messages in other mail clients see scrambled international characters. Instead of å, Ä, ?ɬ?, Ö, ä, and ö they see things Chinese characters and other weird marks. Often the people seeing the scrambled text are using Outlook/Outlook Express.
One work-around for this has been posted by Klas Ahlin on the Apple Discussion Board. You need to force Mail to compose in Unicode (UTF-8) in Plain text and RTF. This involves entering some text in the Terminal window.
1. Quit Mail.
2. Open Terminal ( in your ~/Applications/Utilities folder).
3. Type (or cut and paste):
4. Open 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/Outlook Express users. Now all MIME sections will have UTF-8 as their encoding.
Similar Posts:
- Looking nice for Outlook users
- More on international character display problems
- From Outlook to Mail.app with libpst
- Work-around for Outlook attachment problems
- Setting an HTML font tag in a Mail.app message
No tags for this post.
September 11th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
APPLE Mail et l’Unicode
Comment le poids des ?ɬ©volutions techniques peuvent poser un r?ɬ©el probl?ɬ®me de communication, comment y r?ɬ©pondre…
…
October 25th, 2005 at 12:27 am
[...] The usual workaround for this involves setting the default encoding in Mail.app’s com.apple.mail.plist file via the Terminal. [...]
November 19th, 2005 at 4:34 am
I have a similar issue, but from another side. Using Mac, I cannot read a message with mixed encodings (UTF-8 + ISO Latin 1), sent by MS Outlook Express. The ISO Latin 1 part of message is, I think, an advertisement added by a mail server. I don’t know why, but Mail always displays this message using this second encoding instead of UTF-8, even if I try to set the encoding manually. I wrote about this to the Russian technical support (I live in Russia), but they said only that I “have to select the right encoding, i.e. – what do you think? – ISO-8859-1″. I don’t know what to do… Any help is welcome.
December 8th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Hi Timofey,
I was browsing around this morning and came across this tip on a Swiss help site:
http://www.macosxhints.ch/index.php?page=2&hintid=1685
I wondered whether that would help you, if you are still having problems.
February 7th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I am really eager to try this out to see if it can help me communicate with my outlook-using colleagues without inserting random ??’s everywhere but alas I can’t make sense the instructions. I’m only are recent switcher.
Step 1 & 2 were straight forward. At Step 3, I opened the terminal window and typed in the command, then did Step 4 and opened mail but nothing changed. The default setting is still set to “automatic” when I create a new message. Do I have to do something else in the terminal window like save or close? (I’ve never used Terminal before). I seem to be missing something really obvious here. Be grateful for your help.
February 7th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Hi Kar.
Did you reopen Mail and select Composing: Mesage Format: “Rich Text” and Replying: “Use the same message format as the original” to be your default options? You need to actually select those in Step 4.
If you cut and paste the text exactly as it appears here into the Terminal and hit Return, you shouldn’t need to do anything else.
February 10th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Hi, unfortunately this didn’t work for me. Do you know how can I revert this procedure? i mean so that I can get it back as it was until i find another option.
Thank you anyway!
February 11th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Have followed Tim’s instructions (thanks for posting) and it still doesn’t work for me. (BTW when I copy and paste the text using Safari you get “defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset \342\200\234UTF-8\342\200\263″ turing up in console – so I typed it manually.
Is it right that you just open console type this stuff in and then do nothing further in console? Don’t I need to save it or close it or something?
RE Step 4: my mail preferences were already set to the ones outlined in Step 4 – so I couldn’t change them as such?
Any other ideas? I send a lot of emails to Outlook users and I am really keen to stop the random full stops appearing. This seems to work but is really tedious having to do it manually. I send zillions of emails to work colleagues every day.
February 11th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
First of all, thanks for this web page. I naïvely thought that Mail.app used unicode by default…
To Kar: copy the text into TextEdit and replace the curly quotes with *straight* ones. Then copy it into the Terminal. (Or you could just type it, it’s faster than the copy-pasting…). This is because in a direct copy-paste, the curly ones will be transcribed into an ASCII representation of their unicode value (those \324\200\234 that you see), which mean absolutely nothing to the defaults program.
HTH…
February 12th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Andre: That’s a very good point. I should have thought to mention that. Thanks.
March 16th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Hi Again
This still doesn’t work for me. I still have to manually change the message to UNICODE for every single message.
Thanks for the advice on the curly quotes problem got that bit sorted. Can anyone help me with my other question which was :
“Is it right that you just open console type this stuff in and then do nothing further in console? Don’t I need to save it or close it or something? ”
Kar
April 15th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
open terminal (not console), type the stuff, hit return, close terminal
April 18th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Thanks Samb – my mistake I meant (and did use) the terminal not console.
The instructions have had some effect. My collegues now report that my emails are full of random B’s (which is slightly better than ?s I guess) through my emails.
July 5th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
In my case there are chinese (or japanese) chars in my recipients e-mails
“J’ai bien reçµ votre derniè²¥ lettre d’information : je viens donc m’enqu鲩r du devenir de la ”
Moreover, when I insert attachments, my e-mails get broken into small pieces with a ‘.txt’ extension…
– Phil
July 5th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Hi Philippe. There is an quasi-offical technote often referred to in the Apple Discussion Boards that deals with exactly this problem. I wonder if it will help you –
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/woutlook.html
July 6th, 2006 at 9:07 am
I’ve now managed to overcome this problem by inserting a dingbat into each of my signature blocks for all my email accounts. This not only forces the entire message into UTF-8 it effectively automates the process for me so that I do not have to do the addition of a dingbat to every email (I send many every day).
July 6th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Ah, yes, Tom’s Dingbat solution. Nice.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Thanks! The dingbat is the only thing that’s worked for me as well.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Yes it works 99.99% of the time.
Occasionally it doesn’t but I just live with it.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Hi Tim,
Reading the above text, I wonder if the UTF8 solution will help me with a similar problem I’m having, which isn’t text related but attachment related.
When we send mails with attachments to one of our clients (Windows user) the attachments often arrive embedded in the mail and not as attachments which means that they can’t save the files to disk. The problem often (but not always) occurs even if we select “display as icon” before sending the mail.
Is this also an encoding problem? Would the process described above resolve this for us or is there another solution?
October 18th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Another glitch is the fact that when you “position” attachments in your text (instead of placing them at the bottom of your e-mail), using “Text” instead of “RTF” text formatting, Mail.app displays them nicely but it often occurs that your recipients only see the first part of your message, as well as the first attachment, but not was follows further down in the message…
April 30th, 2007 at 2:54 am
How can I reverse it? After doing this, all the messages from my mac1.forum arrive with no subject. I need to have subject visible. If I want to revert it to the original style, how can I do it?
April 30th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Freddy, you need to repeat the process described above but replace “UTF-8″ at the end of the string with “US-ASCII” or whatever else is your favourite flavour of text encoding.
May 5th, 2007 at 1:15 am
I’ve tried the above commands but can’t get it to work as the specified folder does not seem to exist on my MBP.
I can get to Applications, but Applications is actually empty. Any hints?
May 26th, 2007 at 5:41 am
I read somewhere else that when you use the terminal to force the encoding to UTF-8, it does NOT show up if you look under Message –> Encoding, but that it actually does it nonetheless (you can check by taking a sent email and viewing raw source and checking the encoding).
June 5th, 2007 at 4:30 am
I have the same issue mentioned above by Kar where I get a bunch of “B’s” inserted wherever there is a space or a return. I tried pasting the code into terminal (with straight quotes) but what has happened is that my only option now is “automatic” in the Text Encoding. All my other text encoding options have disappeared. Any reason why or how I can fix this?
Thanks!
June 5th, 2007 at 4:36 am
You can ignore my question above. I tried it one last time and got it to work.
Thanks.
June 21st, 2008 at 12:35 am
Hi There,
I’m looking for an answer to this problem for months.
I already try the tips for this article, and nothings changed.
Any help please?!
Thank you!
October 6th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Hello,
I know this is an old post but i need to ask something…. I need to set the “default encoding for viewing” for my sent messages mailbox.
When I send a message, there is no problem. But when I reply a mail, the international chars looks scrambled. That doesn’t affect sent mail, as the receiver gets the message in correct format. Only sent message mailbox looks that way… and when i select message > text encoding to “automatic”, the problem is solved. But i need to do that for each mail i replied….
thanks in advance.
ufuk