ietf-822
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Re: internationalization of mail

2004-08-26 18:47:56

Tex Texin wrote:

Hi,

(snipped)

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.)
Tex,

It would have been great if we had such a list when we worked on the Mozilla mail. We tried to restrict the number of outgoing msg encodings to the ones we can recommend (ISO types mostly unless we heard loud user complaints). The list was based on known RFC's and our knowledge of the market since 1995. The results of this rather tortured attempt can be found in the Mozilla menu:

Edit > Preferences > Mail & Newsgroups > Composition > Character Encoding

For reading msgs, we did not impose such a restriction and so the user can choose to correct a msg encoding with all the encodings available for browsing. For sending msgs, however, the user will have to customize the above limited list by specifically opening the Customize .. menu -- and then the user can add any encoding he/she chooses.

As far as we knew at the time (a few years back), some RFC's defined encodings for for certain languages (e.g. Japanese) but most languages had no declaration from any authoritative body on this topic. This meant for us the use of the greatest common denominator encoding(s) for each language/language group (mostly ISO types) unless users of some language/language groups complained -- Hebrew and Russian come to mind.

If this situation has changed, I would love to know also.

- Kat


--
Katsuhiko Momoi
e-mail: katmomoi(_at_)pacbell(_dot_)net