Encoding changed when sending emails through workflows causing funny looking characters in emails

This was previously reported here: #1219 (closed) The issue was closed but not fixed

The problem is that PHP mailer uses iso-8859-1 by default. When creating a new instance of PHPMailer, the charcter set should be set according to the variable $default_charset in config.inc.php

mentioned in merge request !525 (merged)

I also think that the default encoding should be utf-8 both in config.inc.php and in clas.phpmailer.php because there are some third party modules that directly use the PHPMailer class and not the Vtiger_Mailer class.

@ruben.estrada We tried testing this mail content as specified below, without making any changes to Mailer charset, Which works fine.

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O número E.164 formatação pode ter um máximo de quinze dígitos e são geralmente escrito da seguinte forma: [+] [código do país] [número de assinantes, incluindo código de área] Por exemplo, para converter um número de telefone dos EUA (415 599 2671) para o formato E.164, seria preciso acrescentar o prefixo \'+\' eo código do país (que é 1) na frente do número (+1 415 599 2671 ). No Reino Unido e muitos outros países internacionalmente, discagem local exige a adição de um 0 na frente do número do assinante. No entanto, ao utilizar a formatação E.164, isto 0 deve ser removido. Um número, como 020 7183 8750 no Reino Unido seria formatado como +44 20 7183 8750.',

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Could you please share with us the sample content, where you found that charset encoding is breaking. So re-check and consider this fix.

Hi @uma.s

I don't remember exactly which content failed in my case, but things like this: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚñÑ should be able to reproduce the error. I think you should take a look at the html source of the workflow template, because if accented characters such as á is being stored as á then I think there won't be an error (you should see it as á in the html source I think).

If an email server is configured in the official demo I can try to reproduce it there. Just let me know.

As you can see here, there are other users having the same issue: https://discussions.vtiger.com/discussion/190889/7-2-0-mailmanager-outgoing-email-encoding-in-utf-8-charset-not-working

@ruben.estrada I checked this case with both EmailTemaplates and Workflows task to send an email with these special characters, That worked fine.

Due to security reasons we can't configure the email server on demo instance.

mentioned in issue #1219 (closed)

@uma.s I was able to reproduce the error again.

I have a template that has this chunk of html:

<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: OpenSans-Regular, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-size:12px;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span lucida="" sans="" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">M&oacute;dulos Simple:</span></span></span></span></span></strong></div>

						<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: OpenSans-Regular, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:12px;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span lucida="" sans="" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Facturaci&oacute;n electr&oacute;nica, Pagos CFDI, Cuentas por cobrar y Estados de cuenta, Divisas, etc).</span></span></span></span></span></div>

Contrary to what I previously said, the accented characters are stored as html entities (e.g. ó). Sorry, my mistake.

The content is incorrectly displayed as follows when sent directly to a contact (not necessarily a workflow) and $CharSet = 'iso-8859-1' in vtigercrm/modules/Emails/class.phpmailer.php:

if I change encoding to UTF-8 it gets displayed correctly:

In both cases, I had $default_charset = 'UTF-8'; in config.inc.php

@ruben.estrada Thanks! on the update will re-check.

@ruben.estrada I have checked this case with following configuration set.

1. charSet in Emails/class.phpmailer.php set to 'iso-8859-1'
2. config.inc.php charSet set to'UTF-8'
3. My Emailtemplate with above content looks like screen
4. Recieved email looks fine screen with proper encoded characters.

@uma.s that's wired. I don't know then. Could it be related to the configuration of the smtp server or email client? Still I would suggest to take my merge request (or do a similar fix) because there are users having the same problem and it does get fixed with the changes suggested, even though, as your tests demonstrate, it seems it does not happen under certain circumstances.

/modules/Emails/class.phpmailer.php line 62: public $CharSet = 'UTF-8'; /cron/class.phpmailer.php line 48: public $CharSet = 'UTF-8';

/vtlib/Vtiger/Mailer.php

• Constructor */ function __construct() {

•   global $default_charset;
    parent::__construct();
    $this->initialize();

•   $this->CharSet = $default_charset;

  }

  /**

@tonysandman yes, that's exactly my proposed change in my merge request !525 (merged)

@ruben.estrada Ok, I will review.

mentioned in commit decd49bf

mentioned in commit e109ca6a

@ruben.estrada We have accepted your merge request.

Status changed to closed

@uma.s sorry, there's something I didn't include in my pull request. I think the default character set in class.phpmailer.php should be set to UTF-8 instead of iso-8859-1

In my opinion there are two reasons for that:

1. Consistency. The default encoding in config.inc.php is UTF-8.
2. Third party extensions. There are third party extensions that use the phpmailer class directly (instead of Vtiger_Mailer). In those cases they will get the default encoding, which I think should be UTF-8. I actually also got emails with the funny characters even after my fix and that's how I realized this point. It happened with a VTExperts extension as well as with one of my own. Changing the default in phpmailer to UTF-8 fixed that.

Let me know if you want me to do an additional pull request for that.

Thanks a lot!

mentioned in merge request !537 (merged)

@ruben.estrada Yes! you are right. Even i had a thought on this, Thanks! for the confirmation. made the necessary changes.