CFMAIL and HTML Mail (Yahoo and Hotmail)

[TPA_Dude]

I am having some display issues when using cfmail to send email from a site.
The following chars are always present while viewing an HTML message using the
online viewer of Hotmail or Yahoo. Most of the times, the apostrophes don't
display correctly. They are usually replaced by a trademark symbol. I have
cfmail set to use UTF-8 as the charset.

???

It???s

you???ve

you???ll

angioplasty!???

???To heck with American obesity.???

The weird chars don't display when using POP mail... just when you view it
using the webrowser. (IE, and Firefox)

Thanks

[TPA_Dude]

Any takers on this?

[jdeline]

Did you copy and paste from a Microsoft Word document? Microsoft's smart quotes will do the kind of things you are seeing.

[TPA_Dude]

Yes, most of the time they are pasting from Word. They are pasting into an
HTML editor online. Kinda like this one. I am having them turn off smart
quotes. Do you think there is a way to parse out all weird chars.. any custom
functions or tags.

Thanks for your response.

[jdeline]

This might work for you. It removes all ASCII characters greater than 127.



<CFSET myString = REReplace(myString, "[#Chr(128)#-#Chr(255)#]", "", "ALL")>

[PaulH]

it would be better to handle the chars correctly. can you post an example of your code?

[JoseyWales]

I'm having the same problems with cfmail to Hotmail accounts (I haven't tried
Yahoo).

There is nothing wrong with the actual mail - it is not pasted from Word, but
generated on the fly in CFML.

The problem I am seeing is with strings of spaces - either typed, or generated
by the LJustify or RJustify functions:

<cfmail to="xxxxxxxxx@hotmail.co.uk" from="xxxxx@xxx.xx" subject="hotmail
test">
#LJustify("Test", 30)#XXX#RJustify("1234", 12)#
Manual spaces...
</cfmail>

In Hotmail, every multiple space is preceded by the character ? (capital A
with a circumflex). I also get a few garbage characters at the start of the
message. I've put a screenshot up [url]http://joseywales.com/misc/hotmail_test.gif[/url].

Needless to say, it works in all normal email clients...

[JoseyWales]

After a bit of head/wall interfacing, I've worked out that if you set cfmail to
use a different encoding - e.g. US-ASCII - it works perfectly. You can do this
either on a global basis in the CF Administrator, or on a per-case basis by
using the charset="us-ascii" attribute in the cfmail tag.

I chose US-ASCII as this seems to be the charset that most email clients use -
I'm not sure why ColdFusion defaults to UTF-8...

[SafariTECH]

yes - that is pretty much all that works - many web based email services use
ASCII encoding to display messages, so other formats will produce some strange
characters.

it also happens with some XML parsings from sites running different encoding
for the XML output

[PaulH]

cf uses utf-8 because cf & java use unicode internally and it's the best
all-round encoding for the web (W3C recommendation). in fact hotmail can use
utf-8 if the email is encoded and tagged properly (though i've only tested this
idea on hotmail in asia). yahoo is another story. even if you play by the book,
it strips out any encoding hints and delivers web mail w/out any encoding hints
at all. i suppose it's so the rest of it's pages don't get garbaged but it is
one primitive way of handling things. the only encoding i've seen it add was
based on yahoo server location, if you were reading email on a chinese server
it added GB2312 encoding hints (even if the email was encoded as something
else). from my experience w/yahoo, users have to manually set the browser
encoding after *guessing* the mail's encoding.

ascii isn't the default charset for most web mail these days, if i recall
correctly it's iso-8859-1. ascii charset is missing many chars in common use
(like the euro but so does iso-8859-1), hey it's 7 bit.