Max OS X Default Japanese Character Encoding/ Mojibake

Problem:

When you send email using Macintosh Mail.app application, email does not show up correctly with your friends Hotmail or other accounts.

Issue:

In most Japanese language applications, the the character encoding must be Shift-JIS and not Unicode. This will cause a great bit of problem with Web and most of Microsoft applications.

Fix:

See Apple Technical Note at

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301986

But basically you need to set some system defaults manually via the Terminal.app that is not available from the system's control panel. After opening the terminal.app type in the following string.

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP"