Comments on: Changing Apple Mail default encoding to unicode

By: Ain Tohvri

Ain Tohvri — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:08:05 +0000

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.

By: Ivo Remmelg

Ivo Remmelg — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:21:17 +0000

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.

By: Ain Tohvri

Ain Tohvri — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:03:35 +0000

Not that I know of but you can surely force all replies to be sent in UTF-8.

By: ih8win

ih8win — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:55:56 +0000

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??

By: takis

takis — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:41:16 +0000

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??

By: Ain Tohvri

Ain Tohvri — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:16:54 +0000

Привет crazyprotein. Yes, that should set UTF-8 to default and send out all emails in the given encoding.

By: crazyprotein

crazyprotein — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:04:19 +0000

hi,

is possible to send Replys and FWDs with UTF-8 also?

By: Ain Tohvri

Ain Tohvri — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:52:51 +0000

Martin: try defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8" as well and restart Mail. Worked for me on Leopard (10.5.4).

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:34:03 +0000

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.

By: BigCloits

BigCloits — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:21:06 +0000

No luck. Text encoding submenu continues to show “Automatic”, and headers of sent messages show charset=WINDOWS-1252.