Broken Accented Characters in a MailTo Link

Question

I'm trying to create a mailto link that contains french accented characters as the subject and email body. Both HTML and URI encoding the chars does not work. Here is my code:

<a href="mailto:%20?subject=ce%20titre%20est%20cass%C3%A9.&body=travaux%20deja!%20cesser%20d'%C3%AAtre%20t%C3%AAtu">SEND EMAIL</a>

Same result occurs without URI encoding:

<a href="mailto:?subject=ce titre est cassé&body=travaux deja! cesser d'être têtu">SEND EMAIL</a>

No Matter how i do it, the new email opens up with the broken characters. URI encoded Spaces and line-breaks work fine, but anything that is not ANSI is broken. I should note that I am testing in both english and french versions of MS Outlook 2007. Anyone know how to get this to work?

Answer 1

For example, with mootools (but could be another framework or even 'raw' javascript), I usually do this, and it works mac/pc with the main browsers/clients:

window.addEvent('domready', function(){
    //get the links to encode
    var links_to_encode = $$('#page ul li a');

    links_to_encode.each(function(link){
        //check if the link has an href
        var original_href = link.get('href');
        if(original_href){
            //substitute it with the encoded version
            link.set('href',encodeURI(original_href));
        }
    });
});//fine domready

Bye!

Answer 2

Got it! This may or may not be a bug in Microsoft Outlook/Entourage. I changed my default mail reader to Mail.app and it works beautifully with urlencoding. The (maybe) bug only appears to affect one of the 2 accented e characters in your example. Perhaps Outlook/Entourage is not handling miltibyte UTF8 chars correctly?

Answer 3

Everything in mail header (including subject) must be MIME-encoded according to this RFC,

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt

It's not trivial to do this but you can find code to handle it in most languages.

The properly encoded text looks like this,

=?ISO-8859-1?B?SWYgeW91IGNhbiByZWFkIHRoaXMgeW8=?=

EDIT: Try this to see if it's what you want,

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=%3d%3fISO-8859-1%3fB%3fY2UgdGl0cmUgZXN0IGNhc3Pp%3f%3d&Content-Type=text%2fplain%3b+charset%3dISO-8859-1&body=travaux%20deja!%20cesser%20d'%C3%AAtre%20t%C3%AAtu">SEND EMAIL</a>

Replace email with your address.

Answer 4

In IE 8 its an setting option. Tools -> Options -> Advanced. Under International check the option "Use UTF-8 for mailto links".

Under Windows XP this setting is disabled by default. Under Windows 7 its enabled by default.

Hope this helps