On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 2002-08-20 00:29 UTC:
> > Does anyone know offhand what other barriers remain to
> > sending email as raw utf-8?
>
> My experience with ESMTP have actually been rather good. The problem is
> less the email system itself, but more outdated auxiliary tools, such as
> programs that convert a mailing list archive into HTML and have been
> written without any appreciation for non-ASCII messages. Many of such
Most of those tools also have little notion of RFC 2047/RFC 2231.
(some are pretty good, but not yet perfect.) The situation is a little
better with stupid web mail services (hotmail, yahoo mail, lycos mail and
a bunch of others geared for local users all over the world), but they're
still far from multilingual. Most of these services work more or less
(even with RFC 2047/RFC 2231 encoded headers and RFC 2045-encoded -
quoted-printable/base64- message bodies) in *one* legacy encoding(or
UTF-8 in a few cases) at a time/per user/per account. However, they
break down if multiple messages in different encodings are present in
a single box. Besides, most of them set MIME charset in http header
field to the legacy encoding for the language chosen by their users
(e.g. Shift_JIS for Japanese in hotmail/yahoo mail, ISO-8859-1 for
West European languages, EUC-KR for Korean, Big5 for TC, GB2312 for
SC, ISO-8859-7 for Greek, KOI8-R for Russian etc) regardless of the
actual MIME charset specified in messages so that readers of messages
have to manually override the encoding of their web browsers to read
UTF-8 messages. Therefore when I write to my (not-so-computer-savvy)
correspondents (including my father) using those 'parochial' web mail
services in a language requiring characters beyond US-ASCII, I have to
use the prefered legacy encoding of speakers of the langauge.
> tools have been written in Perl, and thanks to the excellent UTF-8
> support of the new Perl 5.8, perhaps it is now time for the authors of
> these to have a look at the issue, because all the conversion and UTF-8
> handling infrastructure is now readily there in Perl.
You're right. Perl 5.8 also has an excellent support for handling
of legacy encodings (Encoding module) so that thoese tools can be truly
multilingual by working primarily in UTF-8 (i.e. converting all incoming
messages in various legacy encodings to UTF-8 before presenting them
in html.)
Jungshik
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
