2008/8/14 Gregory Himes <gdhimes@yahoo.com>:
>> The problem is the ML and the forced "Plain
>> Text" requirement.=A0 That can't handle Japanese
>> text it seems
[]
> Now, I know people in Japan must be doing just fine, but I'm guessing they
> have a completely different interface, since mail from a few Japan based re
> tailers (with Yahoo accounts) always ends up as ASCII hash when it gets sen
> t to me...  though most of the images manage to get through untouched.=0A

Actually, it's perfectly possible to use Japanese in plain text,
either using an normal email client program or a web interface. You
only need to use an encoding capable of expressing kanji (ideally
UTF-8), specify it in the mail headers and take it int account when
displaying the text or converting to another encoding. Unfortunately,
most programmers don't really understand this simple fact and assume
that everyone uses the same encoding as them. So a lot of programs are
broken in this regard, and others put the responsibility of using the
correct encoding on the user's shoulders, who's usually unable to make
an informed decision (or know that he should). Namely, Alan's email
used the ISO-8859-1 encoding commonly used for European languages, but
incapable of handling kanji.

I know that the Thunderbird mail client handles Japanese well - last
time I checked it actually tells you when you've used characters that
the encoding you've chosen (or that was set as default) cannot handle,
and suggests an alternative.

Google's web mail works too: 天地無用 It even automatically selects an
appropriate encoding. However, with web mail there is always the
browser as an additional factor - for a long time, browsers would mess
up encodings even if the site itself used them correctly. But this
should not be the case anymore if you use a modern browser.