On Sun, 8 Jul 2001 01:57:29 -0700 (PDT), <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My onna.com mail is very good to let me read mail in many encodings; > however, I think it only sends in SJIS or something. Where is there a > Unicode mail? While both MS-Outlook and Netscape Messenger (and perhaps some more e-mail clients) satisfactorily handle e-mail in various encodings, including UTF-8, I have still problems to find a suitable Webmail interface for our mail server. We'd like to offer a WWW interface for those users that cannot exploit our POP and (forthcoming) IMAP services, e. g., travelling users (you'll find a WWW browser virtually everywhere). We have tested three products, and all of them - talk to the client in ISO 8859-1, - expect input, including e-mail messages, in ISO 8859-1, - embed the incoming e-mail bytes in ISO 8859-1 encoded HTML forms, mercilessly ignoring the Charset argument of the MIME Content-Type header. Two of them even withdraw the mail when you manually change the browser's encoding, and fall back to the inbox view, effectively barring the user from viewing the incoming mail properly. So none of these WWW interfaces is able to handle mail from, or to, non-Western partners; not even Sorbian, a minority language in our own country, nor the languages of our neighbours, Polish and Czech, can be handeled. For a university, this lack of functionality is plainly intolerable. There is a simple solution for this problem: - encode all forms and other texts of the interface software in Unicode, once and for all; - convert incoming mail to unicode; - talk to the browser in UTF-8; - accept input from the HTML forms in UTF-8; - send mail as is (in UTF-8), or convert outgoing mail to suitable 8-bit (or even 7-bit) encodings, the user should have an option to suggest the encoding for a particular message or addressee. But none of the WWW interface packages I have tried works this way. Is there any software out there that does it right? Is there any e-mail provider who does it right? Or am I the only person to complain about this prevailing parochism in e-mail to WWW interfaces? Best wishes, Otto Stolz
