Off-topic request

[Pete Maclean]

Please excuse this rather off-topic message.  As this list has given me my 
most valuable contacts with other email developers over the last few years, 
I thought it would be a good forum in which to put out this request.

I have many years of experience working with email protocols but, in some 
ways, I have little sense of how people, especially non-English-speaking 
people, actually use email.  I am currently working on a project 
(IMAP-related) that is very international in scope and I am finding that I 
need to know answers to such questions as:

    - what charsets are commonly used for email?
    - can most clients handle text received in UTF-8?
    - will client developers be happy if they can send text only in 
US_ASCII, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8?
    - when providing resources for MUA developers, what charset-related
      facilities should be supplied?

And generally, what does one need to know when providing client-oriented 
facilities for developers targeting foreign-language/character-set users?

The one resource I have found so far that has proved very helpful is the 
IMC's report "Using International Characters in Internet Mail" 
<http://www.imc.org/mail-i18n.html>.

If anyone can suggest any other good resources (mailing lists, newsgroups, 
Web sites, books, w.h.y.), I would appreciate it very much.

Thanks,

Pete Maclean

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