I have two email-sending processes. Both are seemingly the same but they produce different results. Both use MIME::Lite.

One sends emails immediately, the other is for larger numbers of emails and consists of an email queue held in a MariaDB database. The sending script runs every 20 minutes from CRON. The body text for both gets to them from an HTML textarea and they have been tested using identical body text.

If we add an emoji character to the body text, the queue sends it correctly. But the immediate sending script produces ��� instead of the emoji.

As far as I can tell the only differences between the scripts is that one runs under CRON and stores and retrieves the body using a database. Other than that they seem identical.

Both scripts use utf8;

I am at a loss how to debug the problem...what would you try to get to the root of this problem?

In reply to Character encoding in emails by Bod

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.