On Sun, 20 Oct 91 13:07:27 +1000, Bob Smart wrote:
However the message will be rejected
by the Japanese computer with "Your message can not be accepted here because
the body is in a universal character set and we can't grok that because it
was not invented here".
What makes you think that Japanese computers would reject a message?
What they will reject is an attempt for foreigners to define their character
set. So will the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans.
In your example, the Russian professor would use JIS to send mail to Japan,
the way people around the world today send mail to Japan. It is only the
IETF-822 community which fails to recognize that e-mail to Japan already works
and is 7-bit clean. The reason why no big deal is made about it (unlike the
problem with Europe) is that it is 7-bit clean. 8-bit transport may save a
few bytes in the message -- generally 6 bytes/line, but it's otherwise not a
big deal.
Problems with quoted phrases (not just quoted local parts) do exist. Trust
me, and everybody else who has worked with e-mail for the past nearly 2
decades. These are real problems, and most of us have spent entirely too much
time having to deal with them to fancy the prospect of voluntarily tempting
fate.