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This was a puzzler. After upgrading to Tiger, messages sent with Apple Mail and written in Chinese could no longer be read by users of Yahoo Mail. The message looked fine when sent, but recipients complained that the text was garbled.

What happened? Apple changed the default character encoding. In Mac OS X 10.4, Mail uses UTF-8 as the default encoding for outgoing e-mail. Since Yahoo Mail doesn’t support UTF-8, it displays the message as a sequence of unintelligible symbols.

You can fix this problem on a message-by-message basis by changing the character encoding each time you send a message to a yahoo.com e-mail address. After clicking the “New Message” button, go to “Text Encoding” under the “Message” menu and choose “Traditional Chinese (BIG 5)” or “Simplified Chinese (EUC)”.

If you frequently send messages to yahoo.com e-mail addresses, you may wish to employ a more permanent solution. Fortunately, you can change the default encoding for outgoing e-mail in Tiger by opening a Terminal window and entering one of the following commands:

Traditional Chinese:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "BIG5"

Simplified Chinese:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "EUC-CN"

(To see the current default, use defaults read com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset)

For more information, see Fixing Tiger Mail Encodings and Mac OS X 10.4: Japanese message doesn’t appear correctly in web mail or on cell phone when sent from Mail.