On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 04:47:54PM -0800, Richard Gananathan wrote:

> 
> I should note that I /can/ read messages from my friend. I just couldn't
> read my test message I sent from a free yahoo account. I guess this is
> Yahoo's fault.

It's possible--I don't think I've come across Japanese mail in yahoo. 

> 
> I have resorted to sending emails with gmail. It seems that emails sent
> by gmail can be read by all of us. (I can even read them in mutt.)

I think that gmail either defaults to UTF-8 or that you can set your
preferences to make it so.  (I've forgotten which, but when I've tested
with my gmail account, like you, I could read it.)

> 
> 
> He uses his cell phone to send emails. He has a KDDI cellphone. I wonder
> if that would be unicode or shift-JIS.

If I remember correctly, there was a discussion about this on TLUG, the
Tokyo Linux User Group list, and Japanese cells tend to use Shift-JIS. 

If the problem comes up again though, you could try using iconv.  I'm
not sure how familiar you've become with mutt, but you can do a command
while in mutt by typing an exclamation point.

! iconv -f whatever -t utf-8

The way to check the encoding is to, while looking at the email, hit e
as in edit.  Among other things, this shows all headers.  Then do a
search for charset.  (Just as you would in vi, by hitting /chars)

> 
> But what if it is unicode? Maybe the test message I sent with Yahoo was
> made Shift-JIS for some reason and I can't read it on mutt becase I
> might not have Shift-JIS support.

That's possible.  Again, you should be able to convert it--it's a bit of
a pain, and I haven't come across it in awhile, so I'm not sure if you
can do it on the fly or if you have to save the converted message to a
file and read that file. 

> 
> For the time being I'm resorting to sending emails with gmail because
> I'm too embarrassed to try anything.

Heh, don't be embarrassed (unless the friend is some sort of senpai and
made fun of you.)  :)  As has been said, don't try and lose a few
moments of embarrassment while gaining a lifetime of ignorance.  :)

However, if he's reading them on the cellphone, then gmail might be the
only resort. 

> 
> On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 07:17:14AM -0500, Scott wrote:
> > You need an xterm capable of handling it, rxvt-unicode or mlterm.
> > Actually, even with xterm you can use uxterm.  
> 
> If my terminal can see Japanese filenames with ls, mv, cp and the basic
> utilities as well as play Japanese songs with mpc. (ncmpc doesn't seem
> to work for some reason.) I think my terminal passes the test. (xfce's
> Terminal.)

Yup, scratch that idea.  

> 
> Thanks for your help again. (Don't think you remember the first time
> because you pointed me to your page again, hehe. I should say good work
> on that page, it sure saved my life.)

Thank you.  It's always nice to hear such things.  (By the way, I have
a mutt page too, http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/mutt.html)  

Thanks to Damir's hard work, Arch is one of the easy ones when it comes
to Japanese.  pacman -S scim-anthy and you're set for the basics. 

Asian character support has come a LOOOONG way.  If you can find it,
take a look at Mr. Oda's Japanese in Linux howto from 1997 or so, and
see how difficult it used to be.  

In Windows it became easy with Windows 2000--maybe ME, I don't know, I
never used that one.  Mac was easy even back in the 90's.  

Mac by the way, has, with either Panther or Tiger changed from a default
of Shift JIS to UTF-8.  I think that MS is gradually changing as well.

(However, my wife, who uses Mac, has Windows using friends whom she has
to tell to use their view=>encoding menu to read her emails. Mac's mail
seems to be able to read any of it transparently, as does sylpheed,
which was developed by a Japanese person.)  


-- 

Scott Robbins

PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

What exactly does buildworld build anyway?  If it really does
build the world then there's the mother of all bug reports to file
somewhere!  (It's a FreeBSD joke)

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