IBM Connections Mail and international characters

Issue: In Connections Mail, international characters like Umlaute are either not displayed or only a square is printed instead of the character.

Solution: The underlying operating system where WebSphere Application Server is running, is not using UTF-8 for character encoding. You need to define UTF-8 as character encoding in the Java runtime environment. For Connections Mail, it is sufficient to modify the application server configuration where the Common application is running (e.g. InfraCluster_server1).

1. In the WebSphere Application Server Administration Console, click Servers > Application servers > Java and Process Management > Process Definition > Java Virtual Machine > Generic JVM Arguments
2. Set the following two parameters as follows:
   -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8
   -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

See https://www-304.ibm.com/support/entdocview.wss?uid=swg21639274