tlug: J email from linux to Win98

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Stuart" == Stuart Luppescu <s-luppescu@example.com> writes:

    Stuart> When I send mail to people with Japanese systems, they are
    Stuart> able to read the mail fine, it seems. However, when I send
    Stuart> mail to my wife, who uses US Windows 98, with Outlook with
    Stuart> the Japanese IME, it appears to her as dollar signs,
    Stuart> graphics symbols and alphanumeric characters.

This is because your mail is going out in EUC-JP (I see your
.signature has reverted to EUC-JP).  As is typical of Japanese
standards, EUC-JP (alone among the Asian EUC encodings if rumor is
correct) _assumes_ that 8-bit characters are JIS.  (All rumors that
places like Beijing and Paris exist on the same Internet as the
University of Tokyo should be ignored.)

Japanese Windows of course makes the same mistake (that's why Japanese
mail labeled as Croatian is correctly read by Japanese Outhouse
Excess <DAVE_BARRY>I am NOT making this up!</DAVE_BARRY>).  US Windows
makes the equally ugly but (outside of Japan) much more plausible
mistake of presuming ISO-8859-1.  Thus the mojibake.

You probably can't fix this reliably with a MIME header, since Outhose
commonly ignores them in favor of its own prejudices.

    Stuart> Does anyone have any suggestions

1.  Teach your wife to use Linux.
2.  Teach GNU Emacs not to send mail in EUC (no guarantee, but will
    work with high probability).
3.  Use TM (not recommended, it is no longer supported and has a long
    track record of screwing up other applications within Emacs).
4.  Use Gnus with TM or SEMI.  TM has the same problems as with normal
    Emacs Mail-mode, and SEMI-Gnus is known to do some very strange
    things on occasion (same author as TM; Tomo cares far more about
    the rights of characters (ie, moji) than he does about those of
    human readers).
5.  Use Mew.
6.  Learn Esperanto together.  Then you can both suffer.  ;-)
7.  Manually convert the mail text to ISO-2022-JP (see the
    documentation for `encode-coding-region') and add the headers

    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-2022-jp

(OK, OK, that's not very friendly.  Add

(defun mule-to-iso-2022-jp ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (if (search-forward mail-header-separator nil t)
        (encode-coding-region (point) (point-max) 'iso-2022-jp)
      (error "um, excuse me, but this doesn't seem to be a mail buffer!"))))
(define-key global-map [(control ?c) (?i)] 'mule-to-iso-2022-jp)

to your .emacs.)

I probably should go back to work now....  but there's more where
those came from.

    Stuart> (aside from using VM, which I can't use because my mail
    Stuart> server is IMAP)?

Never say "can't" with respect to Emacs.  ;-)  One possibility would
be to defeat VM's reading capabilities by putting

		     (setq vm-auto-get-new-mail nil)

in ~/.vm and using VM to send mail only.  I believe that once you load
VM, it customizes Mail mode to use VM functions.  If not, put

	 (define-key global-map [(control ?x) (?m)] 'vm-mail)

in .emacs.  That might actually work without loading VM, depending on
how the autoloading is set up Emacs.  Or use `(load-library "vm-mail")'.

VM does IMAP now, but it treats it like POP3 and downloads it all.
This might be unacceptable to you, but also might be worth a try.

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