Charsets:Compatibility
From OpenEMM Wiki
OpenEMM supports various charsets. ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 and GB2312 are supported out of the box. UTF-8 and cp1252 can be added. With some charsets, some programs or webinterfaces will have a problem. This is a try, to show what does and what does not work with different mail-clients/webmailers.
Contents |
Compatibility chart
| ISO-8859-1 | ISO-8859-15 | GB2312 | CP1252 | UTF-8 | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outlook | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | no problems expected |
| Outlook Express | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | no problems expected |
| Thunderbird | yes | yes | ? | yes | yes | no problems expected |
| GMX | yes | yes | ? | yes | yes | GMX webinterface works with UTF-8. Conversions of charsets to UTF-8 are done well. |
| web.de | yes | no | ? | yes | no | web.de webinterface works with ISO-8859-1. Rendering of ISO-8859-15 and UTF-8 and other charsets is malfunctional. cp1252 only works, because browsers (including IE, FireFox, Opera) decode ISO-8859-1 pages with cp1252 by default. |
Character outside the chosen charset
In HTML-Mailings, characters outside the chosen charset will be expressed by HTML-Unicode-entities. For example the €-character is not expressable in ISO-8859-1. So the € character will be converted to the following HTML-code: €
This HTML-Unicode-entity will be decoded by mail-clients. So users will correctly see the € character in HTML-mailings. Even if you send it as ISO-8859-1.
Note, that these HTML-Unicode-entities are also written to the text-version of the Newsletter. For example, viewers of the text-version will read € if € is not part of the chosen charset. In text-newsletters, these HTML-Unicode-entities will not be decoded by the mail-client.
Typical mistakes
You're sending an HTML-email, and the HTML-code contains a line like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" />
The line is unnecessary. OpenEMM will embed a Content-Type header in the mail. That header will tell the mail-client with which charset the HTML-file needs to be interpretated. The meta-tag would only be necessary, if the headers wouldn't specify the charset already.
Actually having such a line in your HTML-code can lead to errors. If you send an UTF-8 mail including the line above, the mail-client may use ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8. This happenes with GMX for example. The result will be, that characters are not shown properly.
If you really really want such a line, always make sure, it matches the charset that you selected for the mailing.