Unicode chars and Spring JavaMailSenderImpl, no unicode chars under Linux!

Question

I\'m using Spring and JavaMailSenderImpl, a famous spring class to send emails. My emails contain a lot of unicode chars like èéàò or most notably the dreaded € symbol. My c

Answer 1

I am posting the solution.

First make sure about the encoding of the source code (if there is inline text). In eclipse is the first screen if you choose project properties. Warning: if you change it later it will garble your text.

Second It is better to use MimeMailMessage so that you can specify the encoding, like this:

MimeMessage msg = mailSender.createMimeMessage();

        msg.addRecipient(RecipientType.TO, new InternetAddress(adminEmail));
        msg.addFrom(new InternetAddress[] { new InternetAddress(adminEmail) });

        msg.setSubject(subject, "UTF-8");
        msg.setText(message, "UTF-8");  
        mailSender.send(msg);

Third make sure the system property mail.mime.charset is set to UTF-8, either from Java command or by code like this:

System.setProperty("mail.mime.charset", "utf8");

Thanks to everybody that helped me sorting this out.

Answer 2

The problem is likely to be when you translate between an array of bytes (e.g. reading from a file) and a java.lang.String. Can you give more detail on your application's architecture?

Answer 3

In my case, I resolved the encoding problem by specifying JavaMailSenderImpl's defaultEncoding:

mailSender = new JavaMailSenderImpl();
...
mailSender.setDefaultEncoding("UTF-8");

I believe you can also set the value in bean configuration:

<bean id="mailSender" class="org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl">
    ...
    <property name="defaultEncoding" value="UTF-8"/>
</bean>