Re: Is there Unicode mail out there?

From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2001 - 07:52:09 EDT


On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, James Kass wrote:

> Here's a work-around that seems to work.
>
> Added the ZWS after the signature in a signature file.
> Because the mojibake for ZWS includes the Euro
> currency symbol, OE prompts to 'send as Unicode'
> when replying to a non-UTF-8 sender.

  Mysterious is why this prompting (by MS OE) did not happen to Mike
Ayers when he replied to Peter's message with Thai string in Windows-874
adding some Chinese characters while MS OE (5.50.xxxxx) I tried certainly
prompted me to pick one of three (1. send as Unicode, 2. send as is -
in Windows-874 - risking loss of info. 3. cancel) when I did the same
thing. ZWS and Chinese characters have no reason to be treated differently
when added to a Windows-874 encoded message.

  BTW, Mozilla/Netscape 6 also uses the encoding of the message
(or its closest match among IANA-registered MIME charsets. Thus, in place
of Windows-874, Mozilla/Netscape 6 uses TIS-620) you're replying to by
default. When one adds some characters outside the repertoire of that
encoding, it warns that there are some characters not representable in the
current encoding and it's necessary to change the encoding to something
that can represent all characters. (it does not suggest Unicode.) It
offers two options : go ahead despite potential loss of some characters
or cancel and change the encoding.

  Perhaps, both Mozilla/Netscape 6 and MS OE should have an option (
'toggle-switchable') to let users specify that their preferred encoding
(set in preference) be used by default regardless of the encoding of
messages they're replying to.

   Jungshik Shin



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Jul 12 2001 - 09:02:48 EDT