Troubleshooting: Special characters are not displayed correctly in a B2B notification email for the Aurora starter store

When you receive an B2B notification email message from the Aurora starter store, certain characters in the email content are replaced with a series of question marks, for example, ???.

Solution

You might be able to resolve the problem by updating the MIME character encoding that the message notification system uses to UTF-8 encoding. Complete the following steps:
  1. For each language that your store supports, update theLANGUAGE database table so that the MIMECHARSET column for the language is set to UTF-8.
    For example, the following SQL statement updates the English language (language ID is -1) to use the UTF-8 encoding:
    update LANGUAGE set MIMECHARSET='UTF-8' where LANGUAGE_ID=-1;
  2. Update the encoding.properties file for the WebSphere Application Server to use UTF-8 encoding:
    1. Open the following file in an editor:

      WAS_installdir/properties/encoding.properties

    2. For each language that your store supports, update the MIME character encoding value to UTF-8. In the following example, English, French, Italian, and Spanish are set to use UTF-8 encoding:
      en=UTF-8
fr=UTF-8
it=UTF-8
es=UTF-8
    3. Save and close the file
  3. Restart the WebSphere Commerce Server.

For more tips on toubleshooting issues with special characters, see Troubleshooting special character encoding issues in WebSphere Commerce.