topic force the Email Engine to use a specific character set when sending out emails in Operating System - Linux

force the Email Engine to use a specific character set when sending out emails

skt_skt — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:35:08 GMT

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 9)

# rpm -qa|grep sendmail
sendmail-8.12.11-4.RHEL3.6
sendmail-cf-8.12.11-4.RHEL3.6
[root@shdbl2p mail]#

here are my quetions

"How do you force the Email Engine to use a specific character set when sending out emails?What character set does the Email Engine use for outgoing email messages?Can this be modified?"

I have the following question from app vendor regarding special char appearing in the email messages send in the system. I hope the email engine stands for Sendmail here , AFAIK, sendmail does not have any such settings; am i right?

Other than the locale/LANG settings from the specific application user who sends the messages.

Re: force the Email Engine to use a specific character set when sending out emails

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:12:52 GMT

Shalom,

sendmail is really just a byte mover. It will preserve the special characters in the mail, and has no setting for special character sets.

Here is a recent example with a happy ending:

My sendmail server was receiving emails and sending them no problem. My web based mail client was displaying Hebrew as garbage.

I wanted to be able to send/receive in Hebrew, as I live in Israel and correspond with a number of Hebrew speakers.

I looked into this. Sendmail was not garbling the mail up. The squirrelmail reader needed a different default character set to not spit out garbage. Now it took 2 months and an ITRC thread to work this all out, but sendmail was not damaging the email.

It is a byte mover with some really good toys for spam prevention and such. Nothing more.

I'd suggest describing the problem and you will probably find out the mail reader in use is eating the vendors homework(email).

Ever heard the phrase: sendmail ate my homework? In general its not true.

SEP

Re: force the Email Engine to use a specific character set when sending out emails

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:50:58 GMT

as SEP wrote sendmail doesn't do any encoding, you should send the email in html encoding instead of plain ascii text in order to send special characters within.

the common email encoding called Base64, here is some info on it:

http://email.about.com/cs/standards/a/base64_encoding.htm