kmail: Fixing Tiger Mail Encodings
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With the system language set to English, Tiger Mail uses UTF-8 as the default encoding for outgoing mail for various languages that use non-Roman scripts. While this is fine for recipients using modern mail clients, it can result in unintelligible text on older systems, webmail, and cell phones. Suggested remedies for some specific cases where this problem can arise are as follows:
Japanese: The best encoding to use is ISO-2022-JP. Although this can be set manually for each message using Message > Text Encoding, that can be tedious and will often result in Subject lines still garbled. To set the default to this option, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP"
(Also in Apple KB)
Russian: The best encoding to use is KOI8-R. Unfortunately this cannot be set manually for each message, because it is grayed out in the menu in Message > Text Encoding. To set the default for this option, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "KOI8-R"
Traditional Chinese: The best encoding is Big-5. This can be set manually for each message in Message > Text Encoding. To set the default for this option, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "BIG5"
Simplified Chinese: The best encoding is GB-2312. This can be set manually for each message in Message > Text Encoding (where it is called EUC). To set the default for this option, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "EUC-CN"
Korean: The best encoding is EUC-KR. This is however grayed out in Message > Text Encoding. To set the default for this option, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "EUC-KR"
Note that there should be no problem if the system is set to the language in question. In this case, the default encoding for Mail is not UTF-8 but that indicated as the "best encoding" above. Also, using the terminal commands mentioned here does not change the encoding used by Mail for English.
If you do not find the encoding you need in Message > Text Encoding, go to System Preferences/International/Languages and use the Edit button to add the language in question to the list.
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