éèà characters in subject and sendername of mail?

[eluser]alrightythen[/eluser]
Hi

I'm looking for a way to display characters like é, è, à, â in the subject and sendername. And also in the mail itself.

I've tried urlencoding but that just gives me some weird result and htmlentities don't work either because they would output the actual html character code.

i'm using phpmailer