To send a mail in non-English language, text encoding must be specified. Encoding is a method for presenting characters in digital form by mapping sequences of code values into sequences of bytes, for example, ASCII, Unicode, and Windows 1252.
Example
An example of sending an email using the CHARSET argument:
febootimail -FROM john@example.net -TO info@example.com -TEXT Sending mail message with german language text encoding! -CHARSET iso-8859-1Character sets
See some popular character sets:
| Character set | Region · Details |
|---|---|
| UTF-8 | Unicode, worldwide · The most complete character set that has become a de facto standard in recent years for almost all world languages. If you are unsure which character set to use, the UTF-8 will almost always work. The legacy systems may not support Unicode, and in such cases it is recommended to use US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1 for the English language, or a character set required to properly display diacritics for your region or language. |
| US-ASCII | Basic English · Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers. |
| ISO-8859-1 | Latin-1 Western European · The most widely used part of ISO/IEC 8859, covering most Western European languages. |
| ISO-8859-2 | Latin-2 Central European · Supports Central and Eastern European languages that use the Latin alphabet. |
| ISO-8859-4 | Latin-4 North European · Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Sami. |
| ISO-8859-5 | Latin/Cyrillic · Mostly Slavic languages that use a Cyrillic alphabet. |
| ISO-8859-6 | Latin/Arabic · Covers the most common Arabic language characters. Does not support other languages using the Arabic script. |
| ISO-8859-7 | Latin/Greek · Covers the modern Greek language (monotonic orthography). |
| ISO-8859-8 | Latin/Hebrew · Covers the modern Hebrew alphabet as used in Israel. |
| ISO-8859-10 | Latin-6 Nordic · Considered more useful for Nordic languages. |
| ISO-8859-11 | Latin/Thai · Contains characters needed for the Thai language. |
| ISO-8859-13 | Latin-7 Baltic Rim · Added some characters for Baltic languages. |
| ISO-8859-14 | Latin-8 Celtic · Covers Celtic languages. |
| ISO-8859-15 | Latin-9 · A revision of ISO-8859-1 that removes some little-used symbols. completes the coverage of French, Finnish, and Estonian. |
| ISO-8859-16 | Latin-10 South-Eastern European · The focus lies more on letters than symbols. The currency sign is replaced with the euro sign. |
| Windows-1250 | Latin 2 / Central European · Similar to ISO-8859-2 but moves several characters. |
| Windows-1251 | Cyrillic · Incompatible with both ISO-8859-5 and KOI-8. |
| Windows-1252 | Latin 1 / Western European · Superset of ISO-8859-1 (without C1 controls). |
| Windows-1253 | Greek · Similar to ISO-8859-7 but moves several characters. |
| Windows-1254 | Turkish · Superset of ISO-8859-9 (without C1 controls). |
| Windows-1255 | Hebrew · Almost a superset of ISO-8859-8. |
| Windows-1256 | Arabic · Not compatible with ISO-8859-6. |
| Windows-1257 | Baltic · The ISO-8859-13 is closely related, but with some differences in available punctuation. |
| Windows-1258 | Vietnamese (also OEM) · Not related to VSCII or VISCII, uses fewer base characters. |
| KOI8-R | Russian · An 8-bit character encoding, derived from the KOI-8 encoding. |
SMTP
In the example above, a localhost is used as an SMTP mail server. Usually, it is required to specify an SMTP server manually using the SMTP argument. Server authentication is performed with the AUTH, USER, and PASS arguments. An example with authentication:
febootimail -FROM john@example.net -TO ryan@example.com -SUBJ Unicode example with authentication -TEXT Email text in different languages! -CHARSET UTF-8 -SMTP mail.example.com -AUTH AUTO -USER john -PASS ************ Notes
- Charset names are case-insensitive. The charset name "utf-8" is equivalent to "UTF-8".
- The Command Line Email uses the UTF-8 character set by default.
- Common character encodings · The parts of ISO/IEC 8859 · Windows-125x series · wikipedia.org website.
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