Subject: Re: [EAI] IMA Digest, Vol 37, Issue 7

From: Shawn Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:11:42 -0700

> That's what I doubted:  An EAI-aware MUA can of course handle UTF-8,
> and hopefully the user of this MUA finds an e-mail service provider
> with EAI-aware MSA / IMAP / POP3.  But this user might still have
> friends with less capable MUAs and service providers, or use mailing
> lists and newsgroups where UTF-8 is not yet the norm.

In that case it still needs downgrading or the friends are going to see mojibake for their friend's e-mail address.

> On my box characters in code page 437, 819, 850, 858, 878, 923, 1252, and
> others are *guaranteed* to work, encoded as UTF-8 or in various
> "legacy" charsets.

That's likely not completely true.  The characters are likely supported, however it is likely that improperly tagged data can reach your machine and be interpreted with the wrong code page.  For example, its likely that if someone passes you ISO 8859-1 text that your machine will decode it with 1252, leading to subtle differences.

This gets worse if you use some of the CJK encodings since the extensions aren't consistently adopted, and there are encoding errors in some implementations.  So then even when 2 machines *think* they're talking about the same code page they may corrupt actual code points.  Even on a single windows box, a native mail client, an MLang based client, and a .Net client could all end up with slightly different behaviors due to code page variations.

- Shawn

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