How to force UTF-8 encoding in mail.app

Monday, June 4, 2007

Just open up the terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

It was that easy. Not everyone has to do that I guess, but if you, like me, have had a problem with Outlook users asking you why you’re writing to them in Chinese, this might help get them off your back

2 comments so far. Go ahead, write something

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed

Does this still work in Snow Leopard?

#1 Anzen Sam 13 Oct 09

Just tried it and it seems to work: when I include some non-ascii characters in an email, Mail.app doesn’t attempt to figure out an appropriate 8-bit encoding for the content (e.g. windows-1252) — it uses utf-8 instead. However, if only 7-bit ascii is used, it still gets sent as unencoded 7-bit ascii.

#2 Vladimir Vrzić 25 Mar 10

Type here: