Greek characters showing up as question marks

Hi,

I am quite new to the forum so please forgive me if this is posted in the wrong section.

We are using Springs along side Velocity as a templating tool in our application.
The problem that we are facing is that the the greek characters in an email send functionality are sent as sets of question marks rather than real characters.

Here are my file settings:

Web.xml:

<filter>

<filter-name>CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>

<filter-class>

org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFi lter</filter-class>

<init-param>

<param-name>encoding</param-name>

<param-value>UTF-8</param-value>

</init-param>

</filter>

<filter-mapping>

<filter-name>CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>

<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>

</filter-mapping

Template file in velocity:

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

</head>

are there some more settings that we have to make to enable UTF-8??

Urgent help needed!!

~Prasanna