im fighting with strange error. Im using seperate freemarker templates for mail subject and body. It is sent using org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSender. Only templates that contains some special swedish character works in my application ( yes you read right... not the other way). If I delete it my email content crashes. It contains then: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit .. html code here .. My freemarker.properties file locale=sv_SE classic_compatible=false number_format= date_format=yyyy-MM-dd time_format=HH:mm datetime_format=yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm output_encoding=UTF-8 url_escaping_charset=UTF-8 auto_import=spring.ftl as spring auto_include= default_encoding=UTF-8 localized_lookup=true strict_syntax=true whitespace_stripping=true template_update_delay=10 Ive tried to convert subject file with dos2unix tool. Using 'find -bi subject.ftl' show that encoding is us-ascii. With added special character - utf-8. This thing is suprisingly strange for me... //SOLUTION: use :set bomb and save file in vim.