UTF8 encoding issue with iOS Mail app

guidod · May 2013

With all mails sent with Sendy we're experiencing this very issue:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5193599/php-utf8-mail-gets-garbled-on-iphone-mail-app

Basically, accented characters (á, é, etc.) and other symbols get replaced by multiple symbols only on iOs mail app. Gmail works fine. The only way around it is to manually replace á, é, etc. with their entities (á, é, etc.).

UTF8 meta tags are correctly specified in the HTML, so the problem is likely that Sendy is missing a certain encoding header when sending e-mails. Is this possible?

Thanks Ben!

guidod · May 2013

The forum replaced the entities, but what I said is that the problem goes away if we replace the accented characters with their HTML entities like & aacute; (sans space)

Ben · May 2013

Hey Guido,

It's good practice to use HTML entities instead of the resulting characters directly. It's the best way to ensure they'll work on any email clients (or browser).

Thanks.

Ben

guidod · May 2013

I know, but in this case it seems to be because of the headers Sendy sends, might be a bug that can be solved.

Ben · May 2013

Hi Guido,

I know, but in this case it seems to be because of the headers Sendy sends, might be a bug that can be solved.

I've just sent a test email through Sendy to myself with the characters "á, é" in it. I received the email with the characters intact though:

Screenshot from Gmail

Thanks.

Ben

guidod · May 2013

Yup, as I said Gmail works perfectly, but it's iOs that shows garbled symbols (iPhone's and iPad's mail app).

Symbols on iOs look like the right column here:
Screenshot

Ben · June 2013

Hi Guido,

I sent the email again and check i on my iPhone and it's displaying properly (iOS Mail on the left):

My $charset in '/includes/config.php' is set to utf8. If you use chinese characters, try using utf16.

Thanks.

Ben

UTF8 encoding issue with iOS Mail app

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