vTiger CRM 5.0.4 umlaut display issue

The freely available CRM software vTiger (version 5.0.4) still has issues with the display of UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1x characters (German umlauts like äöü and ß).

When you open an EMail in the Webmailer module, the text following such a character is completely gone – the rendering engine of vTiger simply stops the rendering of all characters starting from here.

After many reading in the internet and in the relevant forums and trying out several proposals for fixing this issue, one simple change did the trick:

Open ../modules/Webmails/Webmails.php and scroll down to the function declaration load_mail() – in our sources, this is located around line 712.

function load_mail($attach_tab)
{
    // parse the message
    $ref_contenu_message =  @imap_headerinfo($this->mbox, $this->mailid);

Right after the “parse…” comment add the following line

    global $default_charset;

Now the beginning of the function looks as follows:

function load_mail($attach_tab)
{
    // parse the message
    // HK 25.08.2009 fix for umlaut display problem - added the following line
    global $default_charset;
    $ref_contenu_message =  @imap_headerinfo($this->mbox, $this->mailid);

This solved the issue for us.

After upgrading to the new version 5.1.0, we will have to see whether the developers of this really outstanding piece of software have provided a common fix for all of those Hungarians, Germans and other poor special-character-users like us 🙂