title: Magento email model encoding unfortunately defaults to iso-8859-1
body: <p>I'm sending an custom email in a magento shop. It's using a transactional template, which is fine. The problem is, that magento uses iso-8859-1 encoding for that custom email, indead of the default_encoding = 'utf-8' from Mage/Page/etc/config.xml</p>
  
  <p>I've tried to look up for a function to set the encoding directly, but failed to find one. Did anyone encounter this problem and solved it?
  I need it for a quick fix. I know I should better use the transactional mail system of magento, but we can't make major changes to the system, since it just went online and we don't have a running dev environment yet.</p>
  
  <p>my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code> public function customerSaveBefore($observer) {
      $customer = $observer-&gt;getCustomer();
  
      //Array of customer data
      $customerData = $customer-&gt;getData();
  
      //email address from System &gt; Configuration &gt; Contacts
      $contactEmail = Mage::getStoreConfig('contacts/email/recipient_email');
  
      //customer is new, otherwise it's an edit
      if (!$customer-&gt;getOrigData()) {
  
  
          $session = Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name'=&gt;'frontend'));
          $addressData = $session-&gt;getCustomerAddress(); //get customers address from session variable
  
          $emailTemplate  = Mage::getModel("core/email_template")
              -&gt;loadDefault("customer_notification");
  
          $emailTemplateVariables = array();
          $emailTemplateVariables["customer"] = $customer;
          $emailTemplateVariables["plz"] = $addressData['postcode'];
          $emailTemplateVariables["city"] = $addressData['city'];
          $emailTemplateVariables["company"] = $addressData['company'];
          $emailTemplateVariables["street"] = $addressData['street'][0];
          $emailTemplateVariables["phone"] = $addressData['telephone'];
          $emailTemplateVariables["erpid"] = $session-&gt;getCustomerUserId();
  
          $processedTemplate = $emailTemplate-&gt;getProcessedTemplate($emailTemplateVariables);
  
          $mail = Mage::getModel("core/email")
          -&gt;setToEmail("steinmille@gmail.com")
          -&gt;setBody($processedTemplate)
          -&gt;setFromEmail($sender)
          -&gt;setFromName("EMAIL")
          -&gt;setSubject("Subject")
          -&gt;setType("html");
  
          try{
              $mail-&gt;send();
          }
          catch(Exception $error)
          {
              Mage::getSingleton("core/session")-&gt;addError($error-&gt;getMessage());
              return false;
          }
          $mail-&gt;setToEmail($recipient)
              -&gt;setFromEmail($recipient);
          try{
  
          $session-&gt;setCustomerAddress([]); //clear customers address in session variable
      }
  
      return true;
  }
  </code></pre>