Re: [TCLUG:1981] Chinese e-mail from Linux?

[Yao-Pin Kuo <kuo@math.umn.edu>]

Hi

On Sat, 31 Oct 1998, Forrest Cahoon wrote:
> 
> (I think my Chinese characters lost some control characters above, when
> I pasted in from my emacs buffer.)
    
   As I heard, emacs mule internally use one special encoding system for
international language, so users can type several different languages in
the same buffer. I think that's why you have problem in copy/past from
emacs buffer.  

> 
> The default encoding it suggests is cn-gb-2312, but I've been choosing
> iso-2022-7bit, because "7bit" sounds safer for e-mail.  My friend
> evidently decoded it with NJStar, but shouldn't the character set
> really be specified in the MIME header somewhere?  And ... what are all
> those different encodings, really?
> 
    There are many encoding systems for simplied Chinese, but gb is the
most popular one. Almost all people use it. I would suggest you use it.
Usually, most simplied Chinese web pages or text files you can find in the
internet are written in gb code. The problem for gb code is 8bit. Before,
sendmail stript 8th bit, so people can't tranfer Chinese email directly.
Now, most sites configure sendmail such that it dosen't strip 8bit. I my
experience, I can send 8 bit Chinese email to many place without any
problem. If you really encounter this knid of problem, you can configure
mutt encode 8 bit Chinese to quote-printable. ( I heard mutt can do it,
but I don't know how cause I don't use mutt. I use pine). Of course, in
the case, the program used to read you email must support MIME encoding.