Hey,
I have my application setup so that e-mail templates are stored in the database, and each time an e-mail is sent out, a new entry is entered into the database with the email_template_id, what e-mail-specific variables must be included in the template (ex. a user's first name, a product URL, etc.) that change with each e-mail. A process then runs in the background and takes these e-mails, replaces the e-mail- specific variables into the template, and mails it out.
When the e-mail-specific variables are put in the database, they first get converted into YAML, so if a user's name was Brontë, it becomes Bront\xC3\xAB in the YAML format.
When the variables (such as the first name) get loaded by the process back into the e-mail from the database YAML, in IRB I see that the body text of the e-mail has the name correctly converted back to "Brontë":
In IRB:
email_instance.get_body
=> "Hi Brontë (rest of email)
However, when this e-mail gets passed to ActionMailer and delivered, the e-mail appears as:
Hi Bront=C3=AB,
The charset attribute on the e-mails is UTF-8 (the ActionMailer default) which isn't overridden when the mail is sent.
Any ideas?