500 server error when browsing Apache sites with a Blackberry

If you receive a "500 server error" when browsing Apache 1.3/2.x websites using your Blackberry, the instructions below should resolve the issue.

The Blackberry's proxy server only accepts the following content types as shown in it's web request:

Accept-Charset: us-ascii, iso-8859-1, utf-8, UTF-8, *

If you set Apache's AddDefaultCharset directive to anything other than the four directives above (not sure if the * works), then you will get the dreaded generic 500 server error. I use the following statement in my httpd.conf that works, as previously the ISO-8859-15 character set was used which didn't:

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

(setting this to "off" should also work)

Now the server's response headers will include the following on text or HTML files:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Last updated: 20/05/2005