International Characters in Notification Email Subject Lines Are Being Replaced with Question Mark
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Symptoms
Japanese characters displayed as '?' in email, even though the equivalent text is displayed correctly in the web User Interface.
Cause
The ISO-2022-JP encoding cannot encode all the Japanese Kanji characters. For example, the characters "①~⑳髙㌔㌢㍍㍍㊤㊥㊦㊧㊨㈱㈲㈹㍾㍽㍼㍻" cannot be encoded correctly.
When trying to send the e-mail JIRA converts characters than cannot be encoded into ISO-2022-JP as '?'
Resolution
Change the mail encoding to UTF-8 or another encoding that can represent all characters. To do this, set the system property JAVA_OPTS=-Dfile.encoding=utf-8
. See Setting Properties and Options on Startup for instructions.