Add option to set an inital charset value

Thanks for the detailed report and patch.

In the PhpMailerSmtp->mail function, there is a check to determine the charset to use for the message. It will look at the $headers['content-type'] value and use the charset, if found. If not, the charset keeps the default value of PHPMailer::CHARSET_ISO88591.

Yes, the place to set the charset is in the content-type header.

We checked our code and there were some modules there the 'Content-Type' value was simple 'text/html'. Others contains charset definitions like 'text/html; charset=UTF-8;'.

The Problem is now, that most of the modules expect the use of utf-8 but don't declare it at the point of sending a message.

That is indeed the problem. The sending modules which rely on a specific charset need to set the header correctly, which is the correct solution.

This module responsible for formatting and sending emails based on the parameters supplied. The intent is not to have config options for every possible SMTP and MIME settings so I'm not keen on adding this.

That said, I'd be open to setting a default of UTF-8 (as is the case with other headers) while honouring any content-type header. Would this resolve the issue for you?

Thank you for your quick reply.

That said, I'd be open to setting a default of UTF-8 (as is the case with other headers) while honouring any content-type header. Would this resolve the issue for you?

Yes, that would resolve our problem. Instead of hard-coding to 'utf-8' I added, in my patch, an option to override this setting in the configuration (which installs and defaults to 'utf-8') so a user could change it to a different char set encoding when needed.

Yes I know what your patch does, but I don't think we should add a new setting for this. The correct way to resolve the issue would be to set the content-type header, not provide a config option to get around problems with other modules.

https://www.drupal.org/node/8408 →

This article points out that 'utf-8' is the standard charset for all drupal data and should not be changed.

With this information, i think it would actually be better to initialize PHPMailer hard with 'utf-8' and not to add an setting. So all modules can expect that, if not otherwise specified, that all data is processed as 'utf-8'.

I'm not quite sure if the assumption that everything is 'utf-8' unless otherwise specified is universal, but I think other modules don't specify 'charset=utf-8' because it's redundant for them because it's the standard value for them.

The hardcoded 'utf-8' charset would be viable for us. On second thought, I don't think there will be a need to change it to something other than that.

OK see if this works for you.

This is better.

Thank you for your patience.
We tested #7 and it works great.

Thanks, committed to latest dev.

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.