UTF-8 and email - Wikikn-l

24 Jul 2005

Hi folks,

Recently, I've been hearing from few of the members on this list that 
they've not been able to read most conversations we exchange here (which 
happen to be in utf-8 , unicode Kannada) and have been seeing some garbage 
on their mailboxes. I wonder how many people have been going through this 
experience and not even mentioned about it on the list. Maybe that happens 
to be the reason for most members here not being active on the list, as 
well.

Hence, I thought of sending this mail with a brief set of instructions on 
how to read utf-8 encoded mails. Might serve as helpful piece of information 
for many of you.

First of, for those who use webmail, let me tell you that gmail is your best 
option. The Characterset on Gmail is utf-8 by default. Yahoo, hotmail, 
rediffmail - all these donot have characterset set to utf-8. (You'll have to 
manually change character set to utf-8 on your browser manually to view the 
content - same while sending.. which could turn out to be quite irritating 
thing to do)

For those who use standalone mail clients, make sure you've enabled utf-8 on 
those. Almost all popular standalone clients support utf-8. On mail clients 
like Thunderbird, utf-8 is the charset by default.

So, the next time you see garbled mail landing to your mailbox from the 
wikikn-l list, make sure you check for this. 

- h.p.
-- 
http://www.hpnadig.net/blog/ 

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." ~ Erich
Fromm