title: Arabic is displayed as ????? in velocity template
body: <p>Greetings all
  i am using velocity templates in sending emails
  and in the template i have some arabic texts</p>
  
  <p>and when sending the email, the text appears like ??????????
  i don't know why:</p>
  
  <p>encoding is set to utf-8 before sending the email here:</p>
  
  <pre><code>VelocityEngineUtils.mergeTemplateIntoString(velocityEngine,templateName, "UTF-8",newModel);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>i tried to add the charset in the vm, but with no luck:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>any ideas why such problem occurs ?</p>