Hyphen is replaced by questionmark in issue description, when created from incoming email

[Lise Havnegjerde]

In my company we use Jira for customer support, and issues are created from incoming emails. We experienced that the hyphen character (-) in the email body is replaced by a questionmark (?) in the issue description field. Is this a configuration matter?

[Faisal · Accepted solution]

Hi Lise,

Based on the described symptom, it looks like this problem could be related to encoding issue. Therefore, can you kindly try to add the -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 argument to JIRA startup options, and see if it helps us?

There's a KB article which addresses this problem, you may kindly refer to it for more details:
- https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/International+Characters+in+Notification+E-mail+Subjects

After adding the suggested argument (either in setenv.bat for Windows, or setenv.sh for UNIX), you may restart JIRA for the changes to take effect.

I hope that this will help.

Cheers.

[Lise Havnegjerde]

Thanks Ahmad, I will try to do as you suggest and see if that solves the problem!

[Lise Havnegjerde]

Hi again

we have done like you suggested and that seems to work! Thanks! However - we thought this was default setup? Thats what's said from Jira. Question is: will we have to do this every time we upgrade?

This is information from the tecnical architect:

Fetched from /jira/secure/admin/ViewSystemInfo.jspa

System Encoding utf-8
Operating System Linux 2.6.32-24-server
OS Architecture amd64
Version 5.2
Installation Type Standalone

Problem wasn’t solved until I manually edited /opt/jira/bin/catalina.sh

<<
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dfile.encoding=utf-8"
>>

[Faisal]

Hi Lise,

Great to know that the issue is now fixed on your end!

Actually, the suggested option is not defined in JIRA JVM argument by default. Hence if there's any encoding related issues happening (eg: like in our case here, issues created from email is affected), we could first try to use the -Dfile.encoding parameter in an attempt to fix it.

However apart from the catalina.sh file, you may also put the option to the setenv.sh file, and put it in JVM_REQUIRED_ARGS or JAVA_OPTS.

Cheers.