Email contact form and escaping issue

The CMS Questions
1

Hi all. I’m going in circles here and hoping someone can help.

I’ve followed the cookbook example for an email contact form. Like copy and pasted it with no changes. And it is working great except something makes various characters (quotes seem to be it so far) come out in some fairly unuseful escaped state in the resulting email.

Is this normal? Is there a way to have the email arrive looking as it did when it was typed?

input text:
Here's a straight quote — that was an em-dash, and now here’s my curly quote. How about straight "doubles"? Or curly “doubles”?

received email:
Here's a straight quote — that was an em-dash, and now here’s my curly quote. How about straight "doubles"? Or curly “doubles”?

2

Does this happen with both the plain text and the html templates?

3

Ahh… I never included the html one thinking ‘i don’t need that, it’s just simple text…’. But when I do include it the received email is fine. Not sure where the magic happens but seems to work (though slightly odd that plain text is not so good). Thanks.

4

It seems to have to do with the context set for the esc() function, default is html.