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Re: Changing charset of mail to be sent



On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 06:31:47AM -0400, Remi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking for a way to change manually the charset of mail to be sent.
> 
> I write in English, French, and Japanese. So selecting the proper 
> charset can often be a pain in the behind.
> 
> If the e-mail I write is just in English, I guess any encoding can be 
> fine. Though, when writing in French, I need to select iso-8859-1 or 
> utf-8. In Japanese, iso-2022-jp, euc-jp, or utf-8. When I write both in 
> French and Japanese, I must use utf-8, or else French accents on letters 
> gets confused for Japanese characters.
> 
> Personally, I'd love to use utf-8 all the time. But for some reason, 
> many free Web mail services don't work well with utf-8. (For example, 
> Hotmail and Yahoo. At least the Japanese version of those services.)
> 
> I tried setting $send_charset, but often it doesn't give me the charset 
> I want. I checked the manual and I don't find any way to change the 
> charset manually.
> 
> So, I'm wondering, does anyone know how to change the charset of an 
> outgoing e-mail manually?
> 
> In advance, thank you.
> 
> Remi

Actually, nevermind.

After further exploring the issue, I came up with two points that somewhat
resolves the issue of mojibake(1) in Japanese e-mails:

1) I can simply type, for example, ":set send_charset=iso-2022-jp", to
change the charset to Shift-JIS.

2) After testing with Hotmail, I realised that the users also need to be
educated. The reason why they can't read my e-mail is because they don't
know that switching the encoding of the page to UTF-8 is the only thing to
do to be able to read it.

Alright. Well, that's it for now!

-- 
Remi

(1) "Mojibake" is a modern word derived from medieval nipponolatin "maudit
baka", meaning "cursed idiot".