Transfer-Encoding is set depending on server

Question

Hi everyone!
I have a serious problem concerning message encoding on different machines. On my development machine (running WinXP) I can send email messages perfectly with this code:
MimeMessagePreparator pwMessagePreparator = new MimeMessagePreparator() {
    public void prepare(MimeMessage mimeMessage) throws MessagingException {
    mimeMessage.setHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "8bit");
    MimeMessageHelper message = new MimeMessageHelper(mimeMessage, false, "ISO-8859-1");
    message.setSubject("Engineering-Days - Neues Passwort");
    message.setTo(address);
    String messageText = "Hallo!\n\n" +
        "Dein Passwort wurde neu gesetzt. Es lautet jetzt: " + newPw + "\n" +
        "Logge Dich damit bitte auf der Homepage ein und �ndere unter \"Mein Konto\" das Passwort.\n\n" + 
    try {
        message.setText(new String(messageText.getBytes("ISO-8859-1")));
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException ex) {
        logger.error(ex);
        try {
            mailSender.send(pwMessagePreparator);
        } catch (MailException e) {
            logger.warn("Senden der Mail f�r User " + address + " nicht erfolgreich: " + e.getMessage());
        }The text is German, never mind its meaning, what counts is that there are umlauts in it. The message is displayed correctly, the header is also correct:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitI set mail.smtp.allow8bitmime to true.
As soon as I deploy the code on my production machine, the header looks like this:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitNo matter what I do, it is always set to 7bit. Therefore, the umlauts are not transmitted correctly. I also tried lots of different things, including setting the charset to different values, using MimeUtility and so on. Nothing worked.
Any suggestions are highly appreciated.
Best regards,
Jan-Philipp Stegh�fer

Answer 1

I now set the Tomcat Locale to de_CH. This had no effect on the encoding. I also changed the code and removed the MimeMessageHelper. It now looks like this:
MimeMessagePreparator pwMessagePreparator = new MimeMessagePreparator() {
     public void prepare(MimeMessage mimeMessage) throws MessagingException {
          //mimeMessage.setHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "8bit");
          mimeMessage.setSubject("Engineering-Days - Neues Passwort", "ISO-8859-1");
          mimeMessage.addRecipient(RecipientType.TO, new InternetAddress(address));
          mimeMessage.setFrom(new InternetAddress("[email protected]"));
          mimeMessage.setText("Hallo!\n\n" +
               "Dein Passwort wurde neu gesetzt. Es lautet jetzt: " + newPw + "\n" +
               "Logge Dich damit bitte auf der Homepage ein und �ndere unter \"Mein Konto\" das Passwort.\n\n" , "ISO-8859-1");                  
try {
     mailSender.send(pwMessagePreparator);
} catch (MailException e) {
     logger.warn("Senden der Mail f�r User " + address + " nicht erfolgreich: " + e.getMessage());
}The problem remains. Is it possible that the switch from a Windows to a Linux machine causes this effect?
On the other hand, most e-mails are encoded with "quoted-printable". In this encoding, the special signs are encoded as a sequence of characters starting with '='. Can I force JavaMail to use this transfer encoding?
Message was edited by:
Jan-Philipp.Steghoefer