Knowledge Base

Unicode special characters in messages sent from Plesk server are displaying incorrectly after the upgrade to Plesk Obsidian 18.0.65: Failed to build output message as bytes.; ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode characters in position X: ordinal not in range(128)

Symptoms

Plesk Outgoing Mail Control is enabled.
Plesk was upgraded to 18.0.65
Accentuated Unicode characters (such as à, é, è) in mail messages sent from Plesk server are showing like <?> (�).
Error messages like below can be found in /var/log/maillog:

Oct 30 12:34:56 plesk psa-pc-remote[1417]: 1234567890AB: py-limit-out: stderr: INFO:__main__:Setting 'X-PPP-Vhost' header to 'plesk.example.com'
Oct 30 12:34:56 plesk psa-pc-remote[1417]: 1234567890AB: py-limit-out: stderr: WARNING:__main__:Failed to build output message as bytes. Will try as string instead, which may result in extra modifications. Cause: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 468-469: ordinal not in range(128)

Cause

Product issue:

#PPPM-14661 "Fixed the issue where, on Plesk servers with the âOutgoing Mail Controlâ and/or âFix Incorrectly Set Sender for Outgoing Mailsâ features enabled, special characters (such as umlauts or accents) in multi-part messages could be replaced with other characters, such as âï¿½â."

Fixed in: