> Just a sidepoint here: in my multinational context, we are looking after
> solutions to handle at the same time Cyrillic and French. And it appears
> that the e-mailing tools now are not ready to send plain text utf-8
> (this particularly applies to the web-mail tools); on the other side, using
> HTML gives nice results, even with very old e-mail clients (because the
> HTML text ends as a attached file, which is displayed under the default
> browser when activated).
>
For completeness, I should mention another possible approach: Use a text-
mode mail client that knows nothing whatsoever about character sets, and
access it from a terminal emulator that allows character-set selection,
including UTF-8. That's what I do. It might be slightly inconvenient
(in that I have to manually change character sets when messages arrive
in different encodings) but at least I am in control; there is no
mystery; and I can use the same approach with all other host-based text-
mode applications without having to wait for somebody to upgrade them.
The main problem is finding a sufficiently populated monospace font. But
even with MS Courier New, I can read Latin-1, Latin-2, ..., Cyrillic,
Greek, Hebrew, and Farsi (or more accurately, I can *see* them :-). I can
even see them all at once on the same screen.
- Frank
