Is it better to use htmlentities when sending html emails with special characters?

Question

I have phpmailer setup to send emails from the contact form. I have the page set to UTF-8 character encoding and specify the email encoding as UTF-8 as well within PHPMailer. This all works fine and allows me to send emails with foreign/special characters. I also store the submission in a mysql database and use htmlentities with UTF-8 encoding to convert the special characters to html entities before storing them in the db. Would it be better to use htmlentities on the email text before including it in the email i'm sending out (at least on the HTML part of it, maybe not the plain text) to ensure all characters are accessible on as many email clients as possible or will it make no difference? Additionally I am using enctype="multipart/form-data" for the form, which works fine and makes sense to me, I just wanted to make sure this was correct?

Cheers!

Dave

Answer 1

Most email clients will automatically understand special characters, but if you are truly interested in making it compatible with all interfaces that you should use the standard HTML entities. You can use something like this in your header

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8" />

This link provides a simple and elegant solution.