On 9 Feb 2012, at 3:11, Benny Kj?r Nielsen wrote: > On 9 Feb 2012, at 8:19, Alan Schmitt wrote: > >> I interact with a computer program by email (a Diplomacy judge to be >> precise) that mangles text with accents. It seems it's because I send >> the messages as utf 8 but it interprets and forwards them as >> ISO-8859-1. Is there a way to tell MailMate to send a particular >> message in a different encoding? > > No. I was also hoping such problems were an issue of the past.
That's a refreshing bit of optimism, but sadly it does not yet reflect the real world. Despite a wealth of obviously right ways to do things like picking a message charset and encoding, legacy code and sclerotic wetware persist in perverse bugginess. > At least, you are the first to ask about this. Any chance that this > (serious) bug could be fixed in the receiving computer program? > > Anyone else on the list with similar problems? Yes and no. I have not encountered this yet with MM because I had a very slow transition from TBird, but there is a small subset of my *human* correspondents whose mail clients know nothing of utf-8 and who instead use either some Windows 'code page' (CP1252 being one, aka 'almost Latin-1', but I've also had need to use Indian and Chinese encodings ) or can only handle pure ASCII as the Elder Gods intended. This only forces me into a specific encoding randomly a few times per year but when I need a non-utf-8 encoding, I REALLY need it. It would probably be adequate for my needs to have a mode to force/squish/transliterate a message into ASCII since even when I am mailing someone who prefers Hindi or Cantonese, I am always only writing US English. (I am cultural imperialism in action!) -- Bill Cole
