[Techtalk] umlauts and email

[jas at spamcop.net]

Quoting Eeva Järvinen <eeva.jarvinen1 at luukku.com>:

> On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:15:06AM +0000, Alvin Goats wrote:
> >
> > You may be suffering from systems that use 7 bit encoding instead of 8
> > bit. CompuServe has 2 different systems, the ones with "compuserve.com"
> > use an older system that is 7 bit based, while those with "csi.com" use
> > the newer 8 bit encoding.
> 
> Actually, it's the other people who seem to be "suffering"... My utf-8
> encoded mails came back as utf-8 from the linuxchix mail server.
> 
> Mutt shows all those strange characters just fine when run in
> gnome-terminal.  Xterm shows spaces. 

Xterm can do UTF-8, but needs to be told to do so; Markus Kuhn has a webpage
about this here:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#getxterm

> If I hit reply, emacs shows the
> characters as I typed them.  Your mail, however, is encoded in
> iso-8859-1, and the utf-8 encoded characters are shown as their raw
> encodings (because the mail is marked as iso-8859-1 encoded.  Where
> does this happen?).

His mail client, I presume. Mine (Horde webmail, and a raw text display under
Mozilla) displayed 4 question marks and a string of other characters
respectively; I suspect in the first instance it was understanding the UTF-8
correctly but didn't have those characters available in that font, while in the
second it interpreted them as ASCII.

Most mail systems are now 8-bit clean; DJB (author of qmail) has a page about
this. According to him, the contorsions needed to keep the old 7-bit systems
happy cause more problems (for the 8-bit clean majority) than they're worth.


James.