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Possible to specify encoding when sending message?

#956

I’m trying out MailMate since Apple has removed the ability in Mail for OS X (since 10.9 Mavericks) to manually specify the character encoding of a message before sending it. I’ve looked around in MailMate, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to do so here either. Is that the case, or I am just missing something?

For context, the reason I need to manually specify the encoding (instead of just letting the mail client automatically pick an appropriate one based on the characters used in my message) is because of the software my recipient uses. Specifically, it’s a crappy web-based interface that, instead of simply reading the message’s 'Content-Type' header, assumes all received messages are in a Latin encoding (I’m guessing ISO-8859-1). Of course, that won’t exactly work well when I send them messages in Japanese. This crappy web-based mail client can detect when the contents of a message are completely garbled though, and offers the user to click a link where it will reinterpret the message as UTF-8 (of course, still not bothering to check the 'Content-Type' header of the actual message). That’s great if my mail client encoded the text as UTF-8 (in fact, back when I was using versions of Mail.app that supported setting the encoding yourself, I would regularly change it to UTF-8), but that’s not always the case when I can’t control it myself. For example, in Mail on OS X v10.9 Mavericks, when I send a message in Japanese, it picks the ISO-2022-JP encoding. I tried the same in MailMate, and it actually did use UTF-8, but I have no guarantees that it will always use UTF-8.

Reported by John · November 4th, 2014 @ 05:23 AM

State: closed
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to closed

    Thanks for trying out MailMate. I guarantee that MailMate is only going to use UTF-8. It would take a great deal of persuasion to make that optional in any way. (All other encodings must die as soon as possible.)

    In your case, I assume this is sufficient “control”.

    November 4th, 2014 @ 07:32 AM

  2. John
    John

    Heh, yes, thanks. That should be sufficient.

    By the way, I had actually checked in the MailMate manual before creating a ticket to see if there was any mention of MailMate only using UTF-8, but to no avail. Perhaps that information can be incorporated into the manual at a later date?

    November 4th, 2014 @ 07:42 AM

  3. benny
    benny

    I guess I considered it an implementation detail, but I can see why you would like to know how it works. I've added the following to the Composer manual page (won't be online before the next public update of MailMate):

    Character Encoding

    MailMate can handle almost any kind of character encoding when receiving emails. This includes numerous workarounds for wrongly encoded emails, but when generating emails MailMate only uses “UTF-8”. This is not configurable.

    November 4th, 2014 @ 07:52 AM

  4. John
    John

    Thanks. Seriously, you’ve pretty much convinced me to buy MailMate as soon as my trial period ends (which I was hesitant on doing considering I just had an unexpected expense in the form of a dying HDD…).

    Oh, and I really don’t want to seem like a pedant here, but I think it would be a good idea to replace the Wikipedia link with this one: “UTF-8” (HTTPS instead of HTTP)

    (…using U+201C and U+201D was a nice touch though

    November 4th, 2014 @ 09:03 AM

  5. benny
    benny

    That was just the link Google came up with when searching ;-) I've now replaced all my Wikipedia links with https.

    November 4th, 2014 @ 09:08 AM

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