Sending email in Arabic MIME issue

[siva kumar]

Hi Friends,

Please find the below brief description of the problem that I am facing when attempting to send e-mails in Arabic ( This code snippet uses Java and JavaMail API 's )

When I try sending mails using the following encoding

mimemessage.setHeader("Content-Transfert-Encoding","8Bit");
mimemessage.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html");

The mail component that I wrote works fine and sends mail in Arabic

But when I change the encoding to

mimemessage.setHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding","8Bit");
mimemessage.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html");

The message is grabbled and junk characters (???) are got in the resulting email


I tried searching the MIME RFC's but I couldn't find the difference between


Content-Transfert-Encoding AND

Content-Transfer-Encoding

Can you please help me what is the difference between the two encodings and do direct me to the corresponding documentation.

I would be grateful for any help offered.

[Paul Clapham]

Well, I looked in RFC 2822 and I don't see any mention of "Content-Transfert-Encoding". When I google for that I mainly get documents in French.

So my conclusion, which may be wrong, is that "Content-Transfert-Encoding" is a misspelling commonly made by francophones and that it means nothing in e-mail. You could test that theory by not setting either of the two headers; the result should be that the result is correct and not garbled.

However if you did find that header documented somewhere in an RFC, I would like to know which one it was.

[siva kumar]

Hi Paul,

I contacted the author's of RFC for MIME extensions and I got the same reply,When I told them about the French sites,

They tells me that it is a bug that has been propagated, Further-more I When i say content-transfer-encoding: 8bit ( It means that the message is not encoded at-all)

Now I tried for many days with various technique's for generating multi-lingual mails None of them worked except the buggy technique

content-transfert-encoding : 8 bit

The trouble is that this is most common way programmers used to generate mail-messages with multi-lingual, Many Chinese sites also uses the same technique for generating multi-lingual messages

I am totally confused, I will update you if I happen to get a answer.

Anyway thanks for your reply.