Which charset should I use in mailto body for maximum compatibilty?

Question

I have UTF-8 page in which I have mailto links with template of body. But these template with data includes East Europian (Czech) characters. These characters messes up some email clients like Outlook 2007 and they are displayed like question marks or some other strange characters.

I know about "Enable UTF-8 support for mailto: protocol." setting in Outlook 2007, but from what I know about it's off by default.

Which charset-encoding should I use in mailto body for maximum compatibilty?

Answer 1

it clearly depends on client settings. in the company i work for we had a similar question. we ended up using ae for ä and so on.

we faced the problem that some clients running ms outlook 2003 were reading it as utf-8 while other clients running outlook 2003 were reading it as a defined ansi table.

another issue is involved in the usage of other mail clients. we also have a bring your own device program where employees could install linux or have mac books. they are using mozilla thunderbird, mutt and so on. other clients have set gmail as their prefered mailto: handler etc. so a global change of the outlook settings through a registry edit as in Rfilip's answer would not apply to us.

anyways.. you can only define the text body of the mail. sadly its impossible to define a html body through a mailto: link. if this would work, encoding could be defined through the body.

there also is no such a flag to set up the prefered encoding inside the mailto: link.

answer to this question: its impossible to detect or set the mail clients encoding so you should switch to characters that would work in every ansi table.

as alternative you could provide two links. one encoded with utf-8 with a note that, if it will display weird, the user might use the second mailto link.

or.. you provide one mailto link aswell as a drop down box to select encoding. (including a brief description of what encoding is as hover ontop of the dropdown)

Answer 2

So, on G+ I was pointed to answer on other thread -https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831416/1190066. It seems like that different charsets fails on some combinations of browser/OS/email client. That nothing works on everything.

So I'll use the fact that it's intarnet app and it's Win 7, Chrome, Outlook 2007 setup and I'll convince admin to enable "Enable UTF-8 support for mailto: protocol." by registry key change on client company computers. - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/183b2442-6750-4e18-b61d-d87ce5f3aac3/outlook-2007-utf8-mailto-protocol-how-to-set-this-parameter-in-thousand-machines-?forum=officesetupdeploylegacy

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Protocols\Mailto

UTF8Encoding

The value “1” turn on the “Enable UTF-8 support for mailto: protocol”

The value “0” turn off

But this workround is viable only when you can modify settings of all client's computer.

So I was looking for posibilities that don't include that change. But I see that they arent.

Answer 3

It depends on the characters you want to use and your clients setups...

it may be Windows1250 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1250 )