Help! Internationalization utf8 FAILS on hotmail

Question

Hi ! How do I send UTF8 emails to Hotmail ??
Here's my code
// Define message
MimeMessage message = new MimeMessage(session);
message.setFrom(new InternetAddress(from));
message.setReplyTo(addressReplyTo);
message.addRecipient(Message.RecipientType.TO, new InternetAddress(to));
message.setSubject(subject, "UTF-8");
message.setText(text, "UTF-8");
My jsp app is internationalized with utf8, with resource bundles in english estonian and russian. Each jsp page has <% page ... %> directive and request.setCharacterEncoding to utf8.
PROBLEM:
When my code sends a mail to an outlook client all the foreign characters come up great.
But send it to hotmail (and certain other webmails) and it comes out gibberish.
Is this a "microsoft" thing... is there a trick to it ? Maybe I need to spell "utf8" or "utf-8"... or maybe I need to do a manual byte conversion to UTF8 something like:
message.setText( new String(text.getBytes(), "UTF-8"), "UTF-8") ???
The cynical side of me would say msoft are intentionally trying to screw up open standards like utf8 by not processing them correctly ?
Can anyone please post some sample code.
extra info:
tomcat 4
Help!!!!
Cheers
vikingSteve

Answer 1

Ok well my solution is definitely on the "Hack" scale, but it works.
Put a key/value pair in your resourcebundle for each language that specifies the charset.
# ENGLISH
mailCharSet = ISO-8859-1
# RUSSIAN
mailCharSet = UTF-8
So the resourcebundle in use by the user when they send the email determines charset.
It would be plausable to expect that this just isn't a "mistake" in hotmail... it sounds to be like deliberate sabotage of open standards. UTF8 and Sun seem synonmous to me, and well if hotmail can clobber UTF8 then it is to their advantage.
As good as windows character sets may or may not be, the basic premise on which they were built is flawed and they suck for international users. A person using a russian computer (like me) can't type an email mixed in russian and japanese at the same time (like I often do).
----> (when will american companies learn that not EVERYONE speaks english ??)