email encoding

General
1

Hi everyone

I’m having a hard time encoding my email body and subject.
whatever I encode, the are missrepresented. It appears as if it where re-encoded further down the line.
My code:

[code]// Send the Email
MailSocket.Address = “asmtp.mail.xxx.ch”
MailSocket.Port = 465
MailSocket.ConnectionType = SMTPSecureSocket.TLSv1
MailSocket.SMTPConnectionMode = SMTPSecureSocket.ModeSSLTLS
MailSocket.Secure = True

MailSocket.Username = Username
MailSocket.Password = Password

// Create EmailMessage
Dim mail As New EmailMessage
mail.FromAddress = “info@me.ch”

mail.AddRecipient(sMailTo)
mail.Subject = sSubject.ConvertEncoding(Encodings.UTF8) // and tried other encodings
mail.BodyPlainText = sMessage.DefineEncoding(Encodings.UTF8)
mail.Headers.AppendHeader(“X-Mailer”,“SMTP Test”)

// AttachmentVar mail As New EmailMessage
for each oAttachment as Emailattachment in aroAttachment
mail.Attachments.Append(oAttachment)
next

// Send it
MailSocket.Messages.Append(mail)
MailSocket.SendMail
[/code]

thanks for tips

2

where is the header defining UTF-8 encoding for the body?

Did you try CURLEMailMBS class instead?

3

The email functionality in Xojo is kinda simple. UTF8 isn’t enough for emails. CURL is a good idea or the Chilkat plugin.

The subject for instance needs a special encoding like this one here:

4

emails are supposed to contain ASCII only, pretty much. If you want to send UTF8 you need to encode things such as the subject lines as Beatrix suggests. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

and read the section on encoded words.

The same applies to the body of your mail, you’ll have to encode it as base64 or quoted-printable, and send a Content-Transfer-Encoding: header (see the MIME reference above) to tell the other end what you’ve done. I’ve not looked at the Xojo email class, so I don’t know what it supports regarding all this. For my email client, written in Xojo, I handled all this myself.

5

thanks everyone. I got it working:

[code]// Send the Email
MailSocket.Address = “asmtp.xxx.ch”
MailSocket.Port = 465
MailSocket.ConnectionType = SMTPSecureSocket.TLSv1
MailSocket.SMTPConnectionMode = SMTPSecureSocket.ModeSSLTLS
MailSocket.Secure = True

MailSocket.Username = Username
MailSocket.Password = Password

// Create EmailMessage
Dim mail As New EmailMessage
mail.Headers.AppendHeader(“Mime-Version:”,“1.0”) // for subject line
mail.Headers.AppendHeader(“Content-Transfer-Encoding:”, “quoted-printable”) // for body
mail.FromAddress = “info@xxx.ch”
mail.AddRecipient(sMailTo)

mail.Subject = “= ?iso-8859-1?Q?” + EncodeForMail(sSubject) + “?=” // Subject needs start and end for encoding
mail.BodyPlainText = EncodeForMail(sMessage)

// Send it
MailSocket.Messages.Append(mail)
MailSocket.SendMail[/code]

then the method that does the encoding:

[code]Public Function EncodeForMail(sEMailText as string) as String
// encode

// disassemble to Characters
Var chArray() As String
chArray = sEMailText.Split("") // produces array of individual characters

for i as integer = 0 to chArray.Ubound
select case chArray(i)
case “”
chArray(i) = “=C4”
case “”
chArray(i) = “=E4”
case “”
chArray(i) = “=F6”
case “”
chArray(i) = “=D6”
case “”
chArray(i) = “=DC”
case “”
chArray(i) = “=FC”
'…

  'case else  // all others stay untouched
end select

next ’ Char

// re-assemble String
sEMailText = String.FromArray(chArray, “”)

return sEMailText
End Function
[/code]

it’s not quite done. “” and “” need distinguishing, that’s next

Thanks all!

6

String comparison is case insensitive. You may need to code it like

select case 0
case strcomp(chArray(i), "", 0)
   chArray(i) = "=C4"
case strcomp(chArray(i), "", 0)
    chArray(i)= "=E4"
...
end select

That will evaluate all the strcomp until one results in zero.

7

Why don’t you use one of the methods Xojo provides for encoding such as EncodeBase64 or EncodeQuotedPrintable? Then you won’t need to write your own method.