Knowledge Base

Using Double Byte Characters in ActivMail

Explains why you might see a ? in place of the character you expect

Problem:

You are seeing a ? appear in a message where you were expecting a different character.

Your message is not sending and you receive a java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBounds exception. (Fixed in version 2.0.0.25, download from your account)

Cause:

These issues are caused by double byte characters (unicode) in a message. On ColdFusion 5 or below with ActivMail 2.0 and up the only way to get a double byte character in the message is by using attachments, since the attachment file is read with the java subsystem which supports double byte characters. In ColdFusion MX and up you can pass double byte characters to activmail, through your ColdFusion varaibles. 

Errors occurr when you attempt to encode a double byte charater using an encoding or character set that does not support them. For instance quoted-printable encoding supports character codes up to 255 (FF in hex).

ColdFusion 5 and below may convert double byte characters to a ? if it cannot translate them properly. Which can also be the cause of a ? in your message.

Solution:

The first thing you should do is remove unnecessary special characters, in HTML you can encode double byte characters using &#1234 where 1234 is the character code.

If your attaching a file, using encoding="base64" in the <cf_mailattachment> tag. Base64 encoding is capable of encoding double byte characters.  In ActivMail version 2.0.0.24 and below unicode characters in an attachment would throw an exception in the java error log, this is fixed in version 2.0.0.25 and up it replaces unicode chraacters with a ? in quoted printable encoding, instead of throwing an exception.

There are a few unicode characters that are converted to ascii automatically by ActivMail in 2.0.0.25 and up. These characters include ", ', and - characters (specifically character codes: 8216, 8217, 8220, 8221, and 8211) .

If you are experiencing this problem please login to your account, and download the latest version of ActivMail.

Search Knowledge Base:

List All