Question

I try to send an email using utl_smtp with Oracle including norwegian characters (å æ ø). The characters are stored and displayed correctly in the database otherwise, but shows up as question marks in the email.

My database character set is WE8MSWIN1252

I have tried different Content-Type mime headers in the email including ‘text/plain; charset=”win-1252″‘, this does not seem to help.

Answer 1

By default smtp is 7bit ascii (kinda old tech :). You must be using UTL_SMTP.write_data and from the documentation:

Text (VARCHAR2) data sent using
WRITE_DATA is converted to US7ASCII
before it is sent. If the text
contains multibyte characters, each
multibyte character in the text that
cannot be converted to US7ASCII is
replaced by a ‘?’ character. If
8BITMIME extension is negotiated with
the SMTP server using the EHLO
subprogram, multibyte VARCHAR2 data
can be sent by first converting the
text to RAW using the UTL_RAW package,
and then sending the RAW data using
WRITE_RAW_DATA.

There is a sample demo package on OTN that shows how to send multibyte emails.