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Re: mail for Thai language

1993-04-14 06:17:17
Dr. Yunyong Teng-amnuay wrote on the smail mailing list:

What is the "smail mailing list"?

Thai language has its own small character set (less than a hundred) and
so we use the remaining space in the ASCII table for the character set.
... we just need the extra bit to make our life easier without going to
multi-byte like the Japanese language. ... So I don't know much about
this MIME things and just wonder [what] do we Thai people need to make
our language part of the ... the mail system? we are on the verge of
wide-spread use of the email system in Thailand.

There are several answers.

For the possible standard way to the 8 bit extension, you should see
the result of smtpext WGs: RFC1426 and 1428, not MIME of 822ext.

But, if you just want to use 8 bit, modification to the source code of
sendmail is, II've heard, quite simple. It might be even better for
all of us in the world if 8 bit sendmail becomes the defact standard
than we must stick to the old conventions of smtp, which is just
happening in Russia and some regions of Europe. Many vendor supplied
sendmails actually pass 8 bit, because it uses EUC.

If you take the way with 7 bit, you can use profiled version of ISO 2022,
which is what we, Japanese, are doing. See the internet draft:

        draft-ietf-822ext-iso2022jp-02.txt

or later one.

Though the ISO2022JP encoding in the draft could be a MIME character
code, we are now using the encoding without MIME. It is the way
conformable to the current internet standard and sendmail and RFC822
has been allowing it.

Finally, though many options are available, I strongly discourage
to use the combination of MIME and 7 bit transport, because it encode
TSCII into completely unlegible text. With other method, one can read
mails with existing ISO 2022 comformable terminals without the aid of
not-so-widespread MIME-conformable mail readers (unless there is
some TOO-MUCH-CLEVER gateway inbetween, which should not be your
case).

                                                Masataka Ohta

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