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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: Pedro Estarque on Aug 13, '07 10:02:02AM
I have several encoding problems with Mail.app.
For Brazil, the best option is ISO 8859-1 as UTF-8 is not properly understood by yahoo webmail.

Here is how it works, if you use the "defaults write" hack you will send in your chosen format despite the fact that "automatic" is still selected ( you can check you mail headers as noted before). However, if you send your message in rich text format, Mail will encode the plain text part in your chosen format and the html part in ISO 8859-1, which will choke outlook.

I had a tread open discussing about this very issue, but that didn't seem to grab much attention

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=76364


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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: jiclark on Aug 13, '07 11:59:12AM

So let me see if I'm correct in my understanding of this so far...

If I have Mail.app set to send in Plain Text, but run the defaults write command above, the messages will be sent encoded as UTF-8. But, as soon as I switch to Rich Text, it will send a two-part message, with each part encoded differently??? That seems just plain weird! Can anyone confirm that? What would the possible point of that be??

I send 99% of my messages as Plain Text, so am I right that it would make sense for me to run the command above anyway, just to be sure my messages appear "clean" for most Windows users?

This is one of those 'hints' that almost needs its own background article to be understandable by all types of users...



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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: Pedro Estarque on Aug 13, '07 05:29:24PM
I was kind of simplistic in my post. If you set UTF-8 default, it will always send in UTF-8, but that doesn't work for me because of yahoo webmail.

So if you set it to ISO 8859-1 it will work for both plain and html only if you don't add an attachment. If you do, you'll get plain text in UTF-8 and HTML in ISO 8859-1. This is a bug in my opinion, cause it doesn't make any sense. But it is, however, triggered by a non GUI option (meaning a hack, a hack suggested by Apple itself, but hack nevertheless).
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301986



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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: GaelicWizard on Aug 13, '07 10:43:53PM

Actually, you're quite wrong about it being a "hack." First, it is a developer-provided option, so its not a hack. Second, it is a developer-supported option, as you yourself showed by linking to the kbase article.

Its just a way of changing what "automatic" means.

JP

---
Pell



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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: Fairly on Aug 13, '07 02:21:53PM

Off topic but can't resist: as Outlook is the biggest bug farm in the history of the universe I somehow think your choking it is not such a bad thing? Seriously: I don't get why M$ are still peddling that thing, why people are still using it, and why we should have to adjust to them and not to us. Sorry but it does irk me and others. UTF-8 (and not UTF-16) is a good general idea for mail but we'd all have to use it. But I think that will become a standard. Yes Yahoo mail is really bad at that but they're bad at a lot of things. Give them another ten years and they'll catch up. No place for a rant but if you ever have a bad day computing then count your blessings for Apple Mail and mail standards are a giant leap ahead of what everyone else suffers through every day.



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Force Mail.app to always send UTF-8 messages
Authored by: Pedro Estarque on Aug 13, '07 05:44:36PM

I hate Outlook with all my strengths, but Mail.app is one buggy awkward beast.
Just have a quick search for Mail.app in this site and you'll see.
It is amazing how such an old simple thing, such as sending an email, can still be a problem in 2007.
I share your feelings about UTF-8. Why can't we all use it for everything that involves text and be through with it. Standards have a reason to be.
Email needs a reformulation. Let's decide about plain vs html vs text/enriched, and what char encoding to use. And while we are at it, we could have a look at this tiny thing called spam. Web 2.0 ... Email 2.0.



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