Archived Forum Post

Index of archived forum posts

Question:

email charset question

Jan 15 '13 at 09:39

Chilkat.Email question:

I have a foreign user whose last name is spelled with mostly standard English characters, but includes a character with an accent mark. When the message is sent and received, Outlook shows the From Name as a list of weird characters:

=?utf-8?Q?SOBOTKOV=C3=81

It should be SOBOTKOVA, where the trailing A has an accent mark above it.

My code is setting email.charset = "UTF-8" before assigning the FromName text. I'm not sure what else I should do.


Answer

What you see is called "Q" or "B" encoding. It is very common and an email client SHOULD be capable of displaying the characters properly (i.e. by automatically decoding the string). Maybe you are using an old version of Outlook that does not have this capability?

If your code is sending email using Chilkat, then do this:

1) Test using the very latest version.

2) Send the email to a GMail account and view it in GMail. Do you see the same behavior? If the From name displays properly in GMail, then it's likely the problem is Outlook.

3) Does the email display properly in Outlook when sending with the latest version of Chilkat? If so, then it must've been due to a problem with an old version of Chilkat that has long since been fixed.

4) Test viewing the email in another email client, such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Does it display properly? If so, then the problem is likely with Outlook.