Hi,

I searched the support forums but didn't find a solution for the following problem:

Because my site is in German language I have very much accented characters (umlauts) in the descriptions of the links. When sending out a newsletter I often get complaints that the umlaut characters are unreadable because they are changed to '=E4' (for 'ä') and so on. What makes this even worse is that I provide a link to 'search.cgi?query=&ID=123' and the equal sign gets converted, too, so the link becomes something like that: 'search.cgi?query=3D&ID=3D2=123' which obviously doesn't work.
Apparently this is not the case for all recipients - the mail I and many others receive, is displayed absolutely correct.
I guess this must have something to do with the setting for 'Content-Transfer-Encoding' which is set to 'quoted printable' (I am using smtp, not sendmail).
So I changed the corresponding line in Bulkmail.pm from
print $out "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable";
to
print $out "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit";
which - as I understand - should do no encoding at all.
But with that setting the test mails I sent to myself via 'Mass Mail' -> 'Selected Users' get converted exactly the way some of my users are complaining about.

So I have to chose from

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable -> some users get scrambled umlauts

or

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit -> I get scrambled umlauts myself (not knowing if the complaining users would get correct ones)

Unfortunately I have no idea how to tell the smtp server or the script to do an encoding that makes sure that everybody will get correct umlauts.
Does anyone else use umlauts in the Links newsletter?
What is their experience with that?

I even thought of converting every umlaut (ä -> ae, ö -> oe etc.), but that wouldn't solve the problem with the link to search.cgi....

Any help would be very appreciated.

Thank you.

Andreas
http://www.archaeologie-online.de

Hi,

I think you'll find that the people who receive this 'correctly' have HTML enabled email, or their email package is converting the newsletter to HTML on receipt.

If you want to ensure that everyone gets the 'same' format, I believe you'll need to set the Content-Type to text (Content-Type:text), and remove any reference to 'Content-Transfer-Encoding' or leave it blank/comment it out.

AFAICS this should simply send a plain-text email without any modification to the format. I haven't used it myself, so you may want to experiment with the settings, but there's a reference here that may help you:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/...ansfer-Encoding.html

Hope this helps.

All the best
Shaun

Shaun,

thank you for the quick reply and the provided link.

Removing the 'Content-Transfer-Encoding' line from the mail header has the same effect like setting it to 8bit (which both mean "do no encoding at all", according to the doc you referenced): now it's me getting all the crumbled umlauts.

I should have mentioned in my previous message that I am not sending the newsletter in HTML format, just plain text.
And although my mail software (TheBat!1.51) can display HTML mail, I almost never use that. I choose to display every message as plain text per default.
So it seems that my mail program is understanding the encoding method information sent in the mail header and decodes it as intended, while other mail programs don't...


Anyway, thanx to you Shaun!

Andreas
http://www.archaeologie-online.de

i have got the same problem.
do you have any solutions by now ??

Regards,
Manu

Shopping Portal Shop-Netz.de® | Partnerprogramme | Flugreisen & Billigflüge | KESTERMEDIA e.K. | European Affiliate Marketing Forum.

Today I send a newsletter first time by 2.05

Umlaut will not be shown in the subject by a text-email

In the body the Umlauts shown correct.

Michael



--
Michael Skaide

http://www.cycle24.de