Changing Apple Mail default encoding to unicode
Posted on 7th October 2007 in Mac OS |
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"
7 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).