Action Mailer and Hotmail

Rails
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

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 :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.

–
Michael W.

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:

apple mail
gmail
hotmal
outlook

and yes, microsoft does hate utf-8 …

Claudio