Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

I wrote an application that uses java mail to receive emails from internet users and replie to them. The application uses Exchange server and Outlook that's configured for "Unicode (UTF-8)" outgoing message encoding . Users' messages subject and body fields include special Portugues characters and I see a proplem in displaying these characters as follows:

1. If the internet user's email application is also set for "UTF-8", then the data is diplayed correctly at both ends (internet user and my application) regardless to what characters are included in the subject and body of message.

2. If the internet user's email application character encoding is set to something other than "UTF-8" such as "ISO8859_1", then the data is diplayed correctly at my application's Outlook as long as the subject includes only English characters. However if the subject includes special characters such as "çã", then the subject stays intact but any special characters in message body get either omitted or replaced by square symbols.

I dumped the email body content that my application received into a htm file and loaded it into a browser. When I examined the source from browser, I found that all the special characters were still in the message but somehow Outlook omitted them or replaced them by square symbols. The application does not alter the message contents before it passes it through to Exchange. I'd appreciate it if someone would tell me why Outlook behalfs this way when the message subject includes special characters!