Update: Ok, I've read your question a little more carefully, and realize that you are only having problems with MS Outlook, so maybe this doesn't apply. Still, my recollection is that MIME::Lite is not what I call 'Unicode clean' - you need to pass it a byte string that contains the message encoded in the desired character set.

Original response:

I bet $content contain code-points and not a UTF8 byte stream. Try this: 

use Encode;

my $msg = MIME::Lite->new(
  ...
  Data => encode('utf8', $contents),
);

[download]
My recollection is that MIME::Lite doesn't perform any character encoding of the message even when you specify the content-type.charset attribute.

In reply to Re: Send utf8 encoded messages to MS Outlook by pc88mxer
in thread Send utf8 encoded messages to MS Outlook by mhearse

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.