Character encoding in mails

[Alfonso]

Hi, I just wanted to bring up a problem with the mails I receive from JP101.com

When I joined I received a confirmation message and then two welcome messages which lacked the Content-type and Content-transfer-encoding fields. That's not a big problem because many email clients (Thunderbird in my case) can handle those mails by specifying a default character encoding.

However, the mail notifications from forum replies have these two fields:
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit

But the content is encoded as UTF-8, so it should be:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

As we're going to be using Japanse A LOT I'd like to know if you could change this to a sensible encoding or to a multipart Content-Type.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

[Jason]

Unfortunately, I don't think you can change that in phpBB. I could be wrong though. And I know it's annoying to get garbage in the subject line if there's kana/kanji in the subject of the thread.

[Alfonso]

I don't know anything about phpBB, but it surprises me that the character encoding can't be set anywhere and just sticks to ISO-8859-1.

Anyway, the subject thing doesn't affect me because the widgets used by Thunderbird (at least on Mac OS X) support Unicode. On the other hand, Gmail shows the content without problems. I guess they ignore completely the mail headers and parse the content to display the text appropriately, but I don't like webmail. Of course I'm aware that nowadays most people use webmail and it's a very small minority who suffer this problem.