Action Mailer and Hotmail

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've got a funny microsoft hotmail problem:

I send mails from action mailer with the environment.rb config:

  ActionMailer::Base.default_charset ='utf-8'

The application runs on a linux server (same problem on Mac OS X).

Now, if I send ä ö ü é è à or other European characters it works fine for every email client except for the hotmail accounts (the funny part is, that it is a bug on the hotmail site. It defaults everything to Windows Latin on the page and ignores the utf-8, except if you change the encoding manualy to utf-8 in the browser. Of course this doesn't work for ie7 but for all other browsers.)

The email source looks like this:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 äüäèàà

I tried several workarounds but it didn't work... (base64, multi-part, etc.)

Does anyone has any experience in writing mails through ruby on rails with European characters to hotmail accounts.

Because we have many customers with hotmail accounts, we need to send them proper emails. But I realy have no ideas left.

Thanks for any help

2

If you only have Europeans symbols, use ISO-8859-1, there are no hacks.

(Unless you want tell your users, "Please change the character encoding of your browser if you use hotmail")

And it's not a bug, it's a deliberate absence of feature support. Don't ask me why, Microsoft hates unicode, it's been like that since the beginning.

3

It would take them 50 meetings and a whole run through the hierarchy to approve it, and it doesn’t have Windows in it like WindowsLatin1 has :wink:

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

4

Benoit B. wrote:

If you only have Europeans symbols, use ISO-8859-1, there are no hacks.

(Unless you want tell your users, "Please change the character encoding of your browser if you use hotmail")

And it's not a bug, it's a deliberate absence of feature support. Don't ask me why, Microsoft hates unicode, it's been like that since the beginning.

Except that Windows NT and its derivatives use UTF-16 as their native code page.

5

O.K. thanks for all the feedback. We finally found the solution:

We had to send a multipart mail with html (with entities) and plain (utf-8) in order to support the following (web-) mail application: gmx.de apple mail gmail hotmal outlook

and yes, microsoft does hate utf-8 ...

Claudio