Hi,
I have a few questions. The questions are partially technical partially market
research oriented.
Fundamentally I am trying to establish the risks and benefits of using utf-8
for mail clients and servers.
Question one is trying to get at the risk of attempting to transcode every mail
to utf-8 for storage, search and forwarding to recepients. If the mail is
mislabeled then transcoding may corrupt the message. Since not all clients
support utf-8, I may need to transcode the utf-8 to another charset so they can
accept and render it. Hence question two.
1) Are there statistics anywhere for the number of e-mails or message parts
that have their charset mislabeled?
(ie incorrectly identified as some encoding and the content is actually a
different character encoding)
2) Although I know the character encodings used in many regions, I note that
mail clients sometimes prefer a different encoding than what other applications
traditionally use. For example, ISO 2022-jp is used more often for mail in
Japan than it is used precentage wise for other kinds of Japanese software (I
believe).
What is the preferred encoding(s) for mail in each country market? (Although we
might prefer to recommend utf-8, I am looking to understand what the market
practice actually is.)
3) How well supported is utf-8? I know Eudora does not. Pretty much
everything else does, right? Or at least supports some subset of Unicode. I am
a little concerned that if send out utf-8, then perhaps a Thai user, for
example, will find
his client doesnt support Unicode Thai characters, but would have let him
display a native encoding...
4) I will want to do some testing of a mail product and I would like to know
which clients are
popular in each region. I know there are some local mail readers that I should
QA with, but I would like to get an expanded list.
======
I am new to this list and it was recommended to me as the place to ask
questions like this. If you are aware of any other forums for discussion i18n
and mail, I would appreciate knowing of them.
thanks
tex