# Action Mailer and Hotmail

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 3, 2007, 3:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062 "2007-01-03T15:00:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/d6d6ee/32.png) [@cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cbeffa)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2007, 3:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062/1 "2007-01-03T15:00:22Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/d6d6ee/32.png) [@cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cbeffa)\
**Post date:** [January 4, 2007, 8:46am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062/2 "2007-01-04T08:46:04Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/d6d6ee/32.png) [@cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cbeffa)\
**Post date:** [January 4, 2007, 12:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062/3 "2007-01-04T12:16:25Z")

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On 04 Jan 2007, at 08:44, Benoit B. wrote:

> beginning.  
> 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 😉

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/d6d6ee/32.png) [@cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cbeffa)\
**Post date:** [January 4, 2007, 12:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062/4 "2007-01-04T12:34:28Z")

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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.

–  
Michael W.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/d6d6ee/32.png) [@cbeffa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cbeffa)\
**Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 11:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/action-mailer-and-hotmail/81062/5 "2007-01-29T23:17:00Z")

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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: E-Mail-Adresse, FreeMail, De-Mail & Nachrichten](https://www.gmx.net/)**
>
> Portal des FreeMail-Pioniers mit Nachrichten und vielen Services. Kostenlos mit GMX FreeMail: E-Mail-Adresse, 1 GB Mail Speicher, Free SMS.

apple mail  
gmail  
hotmal  
outlook

and yes, microsoft does hate utf-8 …

Claudio