Changing Apple Mail default encoding to unicode
Posted on 7th October 2007 in Mac OS | 14 Comments »
If you’ve ever used Apple Mail for sending an email that has special characters in it, e.g. umlauts or any other characters that are not part of the basic Latin alphabet, you might have noticed that replies on those particular emails include weird and unreadable characters despite the fact that you didn’t enter any of those. This is the case with all the replies from MS Outlook or Outlook Express users.
To prevent that you’ve got to change Apple Mail’s encoding to unicode so it would leave no space for mixed results.
- First option to go with is to choose Message -> Text encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) from the menu for each and every message you create. But that’s awkward.
- Second option is to set all further messages to use UTF-8 encoding by default. To do so go to Applications -> Utilities and open Terminal. Copy the line below and hit Enter to execute:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"
14 Responses
The unicode terminal code defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset “UTF-8″ doesn’t work.
Still goes back to AUTO
AUTO doesn’t necessarily mean that messages are not being sent out as UTF-8.
Make yourself a test-case and see how it does. To do so:
1. Write a new message
2. Send it to yourself
3. Hit Cmd + Alt + U to see the source of the message once it arrives
Pay attention to content headers that define the charset, e.g.:
--Apple-Mail-9--610482582Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=UTF-8
just FYI: to go back to the default settings, enter in Terminal:
defaults delete com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset
QUESTION:
setting the default CharSet as described above does not seem to work with os x 10.5 / leopard. any idea how to get it to work with leo?
Mac OS X Leopard users should use
defaults write com.apple.mail LeopardPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"to change their Apple Mail encoding to unicode/UTF8.
No luck. Text encoding submenu continues to show “Automatic”, and headers of sent messages show charset=WINDOWS-1252.
defaults write com.apple.mail LeopardPreferredMailCharset “UTF-8″ does not work for me. Windows outlook or outlook express users still can’t see my e-mails correct! Please help.
Martin: try
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"as well and restart Mail. Worked for me on Leopard (10.5.4).
hi,
is possible to send Replys and FWDs with UTF-8 also?
Привет crazyprotein. Yes, that should set UTF-8 to default and send out all emails in the given encoding.
Hello. When I updated to Leopard 10.5.6, I could not make it force anymore the UNICODE with any of the above terminal commands! It was working fine before with
defaults write com.apple.mail LeopardPreferredMailCharset “UTF-8″
Any others with the same problem??
im having the problem in different way, i noticed that leopard have some problem with my IMAP mail server being checked with multiple computers, the 1st computer to check the email gets it fine, next computers wont see the from/subject fields, it would be blank, so after searching i found the the solution is to manually change the msg encode to UTF8, i do that to each msg and it shows fine in the list, but its really a nightmare to do this for each msg on each computer… is there a way to auto change incoming emails encoding to UTF8 too??
Not that I know of but you can surely force all replies to be sent in UTF-8.
Be careful when playing with these. I was trying to change the commands and it crashed my Leopard Mail. All the account data is now lost. Mails are still there. I am not sure how can I recover everything. Would be good to make backup of your com.apple.mail.plist file before making these changes.
What do you mean by “changing the commands”? Setting the defaults definitely does not affect account information.
If you’re planning to do more or experiment further than the above commands, backing up is surely a way to go. People using Time Machine could extend the backup to [username]/Library.