diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 0f0da4f6c..f4ae5abaa 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ Bugs fixed
 * #1843: Fix documentation of descriptor classes that have a custom metaclass.
   Thanks to Erik Bray.
 * #3190: util.split_docinfo fails to parse multi-line field bodies
+* #3024, #3037: In Python3, application.Sphinx._log crushed when the log message cannot
+  be encoded into console encoding.
 
 Release 1.4.9 (released Nov 23, 2016)
 =====================================
diff --git a/sphinx/application.py b/sphinx/application.py
index 9d99227c5..45d5d5986 100644
--- a/sphinx/application.py
+++ b/sphinx/application.py
@@ -322,7 +322,9 @@ class Sphinx(object):
             wfile.write(message)
         except UnicodeEncodeError:
             encoding = getattr(wfile, 'encoding', 'ascii') or 'ascii'
-            wfile.write(message.encode(encoding, 'replace'))
+            # wfile.write accept only str, not bytes.So, we encode and replace
+            # non-encodable characters, then decode them.
+            wfile.write(message.encode(encoding, 'replace').decode(encoding))
         if not nonl:
             wfile.write('\n')
         if hasattr(wfile, 'flush'):
diff --git a/tests/test_application.py b/tests/test_application.py
index 420680451..b0ad4b8d6 100644
--- a/tests/test_application.py
+++ b/tests/test_application.py
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@
     :copyright: Copyright 2007-2016 by the Sphinx team, see AUTHORS.
     :license: BSD, see LICENSE for details.
 """
+import codecs
 
 from docutils import nodes
 
@@ -49,21 +50,40 @@ def test_emit_with_nonascii_name_node(app, status, warning):
 
 @with_app()
 def test_output(app, status, warning):
+    # info with newline
     status.truncate(0)  # __init__ writes to status
     status.seek(0)
     app.info("Nothing here...")
     assert status.getvalue() == "Nothing here...\n"
+    # info without newline
     status.truncate(0)
     status.seek(0)
     app.info("Nothing here...", True)
     assert status.getvalue() == "Nothing here..."
 
+    # warning
     old_count = app._warncount
     app.warn("Bad news!")
     assert warning.getvalue() == "WARNING: Bad news!\n"
     assert app._warncount == old_count + 1
 
 
+@with_app()
+def test_output_with_unencodable_char(app, status, warning):
+
+    class StreamWriter(codecs.StreamWriter):
+        def write(self, object):
+            self.stream.write(object.encode('cp1252').decode('cp1252'))
+
+    app._status = StreamWriter(status)
+
+    # info with UnicodeEncodeError
+    status.truncate(0)
+    status.seek(0)
+    app.info(u"unicode \u206d...")
+    assert status.getvalue() == "unicode ?...\n"
+
+
 @with_app()
 def test_extensions(app, status, warning):
     app.setup_extension('shutil')