e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)

[Frank McConnell]

Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding whatsoever of character sets or encoding.  They simply display data from the e-mail file on stdout or equivalent.  If you are lucky, the character set and encoding in the e-mail match the character set and encoding used by your terminal.

The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to indicate its character set and encoding, because at that point in time there were many character sets and multiple encodings.  Before that, you had to figure them out from your correspondent's e-mail address and the mess on your screen or printout.

And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host operating system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using to view e-mail.  Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a terminal built to display US-ASCII like an HP 2645.  Your chances get better if the software has enough understanding of various Roman-language text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8 character support and the connection between your host and terminal is eight-bit-clean.  But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now you're looking at having another HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping your host software knows how to deal with those character sets and encodings too!

-Frank McConnell

On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
> 
> seems only the  very old   mail programs  do not adapt  to all character sets? 
> 
> 
> In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
> 
>  
> 
> 
>> On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>>> Ed,
>>> It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and 
>>> then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
>>> 
>>> ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in 
>>> everything that you send!
>>> I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of 
>>> inappropriate spaces.
>>> 
>>> Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
>>> Everybody? but you sees it.
>>> 
>> 
>> I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
>> 
>> copy of the offending text included.
>> 
>> 
>> bill
>> 
> same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
> 
> kelly
>