I am strugeling with character encoding in seam mail.

There are special chars like german umlaute in my mail. Of course i can encode them in the html but in the text alternative thats not possible.

The file is in utf-8, everytime i render a mail with a velocitytemplate the special chars are crippled. Even if i try to log the text that was rendered (tostring) the characters are crippled already.

i have tried to put a velocity.properties in the resource dir(and in web-inf) with

input.encoding=UTF-8 and
output.encoding=UTF-8

but that did not change a thing

any suggestions?
thank you