phplist greek encoding problem verion 2.10.12

I installed phplist version 2.10.12 for a newsletter application, but I had some problems with the greek characters. This post may concern not only the greek language, but any other language with utf-8 encoding as well.

Phplist, (for those who have never heard something about it), is a popular open source email campaign manager that is easy to install and intergrate with any website. There is a lot of documentation about it at the following address http://www.phplist.com.

As far as the greek encoding problem is concerned, I give you 2 links that helped me clear things out. 
thingshttp://blog.biznet.gr/2010/03/16/phplist-2-10-10-greek-support-utf-8/
http://mantis.phplist.com/view.php?id=1644 

Here is what made the trick for me:


Configuration page:
After you login to admin, on main page in section "Configuration functions" click configure and change the following:
 - Charset for HTML messages: UTF-8
 - Charset for Text messages: UTF-8


config.php:
 - $language_module = "greek.inc"; ***
 - define("HTMLEMAIL_ENCODING","quoted-printable");
 - define("TEXTEMAIL_ENCODING",'7bit');

***In greek.inc you have to do some changes. Find  lists/texts/greek.inc and change this:

$strCharSet = 'utf-8';

When you save the txt file, you have to choose encoding utf-8.


database encoding

- the database (individual tables + any text columns) should be set to UTF-8
- the PHP-MySQL connection should be set to UTF-8, since it will otherwise default to latin1
You can collect additional server related info by using the following query in phpMyAdmin: SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_%'

character_set_client utf8
character_set_connection utf8
character_set_database utf8
character_set_results utf8
character_set_server latin1
character_set_system utf8 


Til this point I had the following:
-The body of the message was fine both at email and admin system of phplist too.
-The subject was not greek neither at the email nor at the admin page.


So I made a change at the following page of phplist:

admin/pagetop.php
- the HTML page's Content-Type should be set to UTF-8 (I hardcoded utf-8)

After this change the subject of the message was greek at the email, but not at the admin system. What solved the problem was changing the charset to utf-8 at admin/phpmailer/class.phplistmailer.php

I hope I helped someone else with this post!

You may also check this post about phplist version 2.10.13.