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Hi,

I just contacted my hosting company for the domain/email server. They responded

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The Emails that are sent from the contact form are not encoded with UTF-8. This is the reason that some letters (so called “Umlaute”) are not displayed correctly. The
UTF-8 encoding is used for the website, however, this must be added to wp-mail.php as well.

To change the encoding to UTF-8 it is sufficient to give the value in the following way

$charset = ‘UTF-8’;

Right now, it has the value

$charset = ”;

Our mail server simply use the encoding provided by the sender of the message, in your case the encoding of the contact form. A change of the encoding by our mail server is not possible.”
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I think, that part of their response is nonsense. The $charset = ”; in wp-mail.php is simply a default value before the encoding is derived from the message.

However, there still remains the question where the non-UTF-8 encoding is coming from. I watched the incoming message to my mail server… and the message was not UTF-8 encoded.

… there must be some problem with the contact form and the way the message is sent …

Best wishes
Thomas