Re: Japanese language email problem (cont'd)

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> (1) He also had a "Pine" message-ID; I don't think he *can* change his 
>     Content-Type header.

  As a matter of fact, following Kazuko's advice, I just did.  Pine
under Unix provides for system-wide configuration which can also be
overridden by individual users' ~/.pinerc files.  Surprisingly, Pine
now labels my messages "us-ascii" when there's no kanji in them, and
iso-2022-jp when there is.  Pretty clever.  Unfortunately, I can't
verify whether this solves the immediate problem or not, because my
correspondent is not available today.    

> (2) The "US-ASCII" is wrong, of course.  But ISO-2022-JP is also
> wrong!!  His message was in Shift-JIS, and he apparently also uses
> EUC, but mostly not JIS (== ISO-2022-JP).  So if he adds a tag saying
> that it's ISO-2022-JP, he's encouraging mail user agents (MUAs) and
> maybe mail transport agents (MTAs) to error-correct the content to
> 7-bit JIS!

  I'm afraid I have been unwittingly using a variety of encodings up
to now.  It seems that I am now exclusively outputting New-JIS by
default - at least, this is what jconv -c tells me.  Please correct me
if I'm wrong.  The following three lines should all be in New-JIS:

  $B$3$l$,(BNew-JIS$B$N$O$:$@!#`*rJ!#rJG7Bg!$ITCNB6Q\@example.com$Li!#(B

(If the last of these lines is unreadable, don't blame me, 
blame Zhuang Zi ;-)

  Steve Turnbull also remarked:

	Despite my earlier comments about standards (in response to
	Kazuyuki "ikko-" Okamoto), unless you are willing to switch
	your mail software (and check the new program for
	compliance) "ikko-" is probably right that you should just
	default to "Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-2022-JP".
	You may be able to do this in Pine via [S]etup
	[C]onfiguration [customized-hdrs]; unfortunately it seems
	that Pine will add its own conflicting Content-Type header.
	It's not obvious how to disable this, if it's at all
	possible.  (pine.conf and .pinerc simply seem to be
	config-file interfaces to the same functionality).  You may
	also want to set [S][C][default-composer-hdrs] to
	automatically display it.  You can always access it via C-R
	"Rich Headers" in the composer.  

  Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue here, but, now that I've
configured it correctly, the version of Pine I'm using uses the
"Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-2022-JP" header if there's
Japanese in the text, and "Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII"
when there isn't.  Shouldn't this be OK?

  By the way, Steve, I thought http://130.158.99.4/gadgets/gaijin.gif
was pretty cute!  Cheers.

Dennis McMurchy, 
Tojinmachi, Fukuoka



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