Re: Japanese language email problem (cont'd)

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Kazuyuki" == Kazuyuki Okamoto <ikko-@example.com> writes:

    Kazuyuki> HI, all; If you eager to use Japanese in e-mail, please
    Kazuyuki> put on the header below :
    >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp
    Kazuyuki> You used like below :
    >> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

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

(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 don't know if Mule gets this right when sending.  I doubt that much
of any software gets it right.  I don't know if any receiving software
pays any attention to the "charset=ISO-2022-JP" because it means at
most "Japanese" since almost nobody sends out the true encoding.  I'm
sure the Chinese have the same problem with Big-5 and GB encodings....

The big problem with "charset=US-ASCII" is that it encourages the MTA
to "correct" the content if there's shift-JIS or EUC or ISO-Latin-*
(which all use characters with the 8-th bit set) in the message....  I
believe a compliant MUA should issue a warning in that case.  However,
most MTAs and MUAs will simply pass the message body through (to the
system display functions in the case of the MUA), which gives a 1 in 3
chance of getting it right for Japanese systems which default to
Japanese, if you specify charset=US-ASCII.  So I think Dennis
McMurchy's problem is elsewhere.

I do believe that we should try to be compliant to the standards on
this, but for Japanese it's just plain !@#$% mendokusai (not to
mention error-prone).  Just adding "charset=ISO-2022-JP" to your
content-type header turns that into a synonym for "Japanese", which it 
isn't intended to be.

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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