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For all those that work with international sites and are not accustomed to working with PHP code, I wanted to impart upon you a very long and arduous story where we believe we finally fixed a vexing problem that had to do with how Emails are encoded by the PHPMailer libraries included with Joomla 1.5 and various other extensions we had installed.

Emails that were submitted were not displaying properly with UTF-8 encoding. Instead, they were using ISO encoding. For many of my client's international users, this presented a HUGE problem. We tried everything we could think of from asking the host provider to make sure the mailer daemon sent Emails using UTF-8 encoding to adding HTML META text encoding, and we were all pulling our hair out.

After much deliberation and research, the host provider found the problem to be within the PHPMailer libraries included with Joomla (all versions), as well as PHPMailer libraries included with various extensions such as CommunityBuilder, and the Sankuru Email Editor. BOTH of these packages for some reason do not use the standard PHPMailer library that comes with Joomla and decided to install their own in their component directories. If you change the $CharSet variable within the phpmailer library from 'iso-8559-1' to 'utf-8', somewhere around line 50

change

var $CharSet = 'iso-8559-1';

to

var $CharSet = 'utf-8';

the problem is resolved! International characters are now able to be displayed within an Email without having to manually have the end user change its encoding to display it.

I wanted to put that out there for anyone who has had this vexing problem and needed a solution. It's got nothing to do with your end user Email client software. The problem lies within the PHPMailer library itself. If the Joomla Development Team sees this posting, I would encourage them to please make this change to your code so that those of us who support International communities can still have some hair left at the end of the day.

Kind thanks,

Chad Baus,

Chicago, IL

What was the problem?

If the charset encoding is set to iso-8559-1, then double-byte characters in Japanese/Chinese or European characters used in the German language don't come out correctly when using the PHPMailer library. Our host provider at Rackspace suggested we change the PHPMailer library's CharSet to 'utf-8' which I had to manually change in order to fix the problem. By default, the PHPMailer Library (all versions used) was set to 'iso-8559-1', which doesn't work with European and Asian characters delivering text Emails.

Ok, I work with international site but never used chinese or german characters, probably thats why I didnt understand what was the problem.
Thank you