Unicode characters mangled when sending as attachment

13 years ago • updated by 13 years ago • 3

The other day I tried sending a UTF-8 encoded LaTeX file as an attachment, only to find out that when the file arrived, non-ASCII characters (such as German ö, ä, ü and ß) had been replaced by two question marks.

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13 years ago

How did you try to open the file on the receiver's end? I can't reproduce the problem.

The file is just attached as is to the email. You need to make sure that the text editor on your computer uses utf-8 when opening the file. For example, with TextEdit on Mac OS X, you need to manually select utf-8 in the file open dialog because it doesn't detect the encoding automatically.

13 years ago

The problem is independent from the text editor I use (Emacs), as the problem already occurs in my mail client (Mutt). When I access my mail via webmail (Fastmail), the file is not recognized by the Fastmail interface as UTF-8 but is displayed as iso-8859-1 (I think). When I download the file from webmail, it is saved correctly and Emacs can open it as a UTF-8 file.

So it seems the problem lies elsewhere... Sorry to bother you with this and thanks for the quick reply. :-)

13 years ago

So it looks like your mail client uses the wrong encoding when displaying the file.

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