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Asked: 2026-05-26T05:57:41+00:00

In my ASP.NET MVC application I am creating a mailto link where the subject

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In my ASP.NET MVC application I am creating a mailto link where the subject and body contain a pound £ symbol.

This appears to work in most cases but some users with Outlook 2003/Chrome is reporting that when clicking the link the pound symbol is showing as £, which looks to me like it is interpreting a UTF-8 string as ascii/windows-1252/whatever etc.

I’m not sure how I should encode this. Currently I am using the following:

public static HtmlString EncodeMailTo(this HtmlHelper hlp, string val)
{
  var encoded = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(val).Replace("+", "%20");
  return new HtmlString(encoded);
}

and in the view:

<a href="mailto:?subject=@(Html.EncodeMailTo(Model.Offer.Heading))&body=@(Html.EncodeMailTo(Model.Offer.Requirement))" >
    Link
</a>

Is there a way that I can convert this to a different encoding (e.g. Windows-1252) before UrlEncoding it? I’ve tried converting the encoding of the string and then passing this and the encoding used into UrlEncode but get ? instead of the £ symbols then.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re not going to find any one answer that solves this problem for all browsers/email clients. Using the &pound; as suggested by Matt Fellows may work on some clients in this instance. However, you’ll run in to problems with other characters that do not have a named html entity, or browsers/email clients that do not handle entities correctly.

    Even more annoying is if you correct it for one browser/email set up (e.g. using Windows-1252) it might then break clients using UTF-8.

    In the end, the only real solution is for browsers and email clients to upgrade to using UTF-8, see Avoiding an international mailto maelstrom.

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