Question

We are sending out newsletters. The format used is html as far as i know, but on some clients accented letters don’t render just there code can be seen. For example: “&nbsp” or “&eacute” etc.
Unfortunately i don’t know more details yet, because my friend asked me to help him with this. What would be the proper email header for these kind of emails? I suspect the problem lies there.
Thanks for helping.

update:
I got more information now. The thing is that they are using a service provided by a third party. It’s web based using TinyMCE for editing mails(unfortunately i doubt that i can get access to settings). Anyway they managed to send me a header of the mail:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Shouldn’t be “text/html” instead of “text/plain”? Because if it’s plain then it’s obvious that it’s not rendering, right? Or is it possible that the email header sent is “text/html” but the mail software on the client can’t handle html mails and changes it to “text/plain” ? Thanks for your help, Alex

Answer 1

If things work for some clients and don’t work for others, it is probable that the charset parameter in the Content-Type MIME header in the email is wrong or missing (forcing programs to guess) or some email programs do not support the character encoding used or there is a similar problem with transfer encodings.

It would be (in some sense at least) simplest to circumvent such problems by encoding all non-ASCII data using entity or character references, such as ´ for é (see e.g. a list of references for the Latin-1 Supplement). This would work on all programs that can deal with HTML format and would not depend on character or transfer encoding issues.