Introduction

Many mail clients are configured to send only ASCII (English only) text. Here is how to configure some popular mail clients to use the international standard UTF-8 encoding.

Thunderbird 2

Thunderbird is available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. These screenshots were made on Linux. Other systems may vary slightly, but should still be similar.

In short:

• Edit
• Preferences
• Display
• Formatting
• Fonts
• Character Encodings
• Outgoing Mail
• Unicode (UTF-8)

In pictures:

Outlook 2003

Microsoft has two email clients for Windows: Outlook and Outlook Express. This guide is for Outlook 2003. I can only assume that other versions of Outlook, and Outlook Express, might be similar.

In short:

• Tools
• Options
• Mail Format
• International Options
• Preferred encoding for outgoing messages
• Unicode (UTF-8)

In pictures:

Date Published: 2008-07-15