[sylpheed:34188] Re: curiosity: what default encoding is used by Sylpheed for Japanese ?

[Hiroyuki Yamamoto]

Hello,

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:32:43 +0300
Cristian Secară <liste at secarica.ro> wrote:

> Question from subject, for a message written in Japanese language,
> assuming a Japanese Sylpheed installed on a Japanese system, both
> Linux and Windows.
> 
> I am in a small talk about encodings and one idea discussed was that
> the default encoding in an e-mail client should perhaps be utf-8,
> except for Chinese and Japanese. Just wondering how correct this idea
> is, so I become curious about a Japanese native product, like
> Sylpheed.

In Japan, ISO-2022-JP (so-called JIS encoding) is a de facto standard,
and still commonly used for e-mail. ISO-2022-JP is a 7-bit encoding
with escape sequences, so it used to be useful for MTA/MDA which don't
accept 8-bit stream. The default Japanese encoding of Sylpheed is
ISO-2022-JP (when using ja_JP.* locale).

Now, most of modern systems accept UTF-8, so it may be safe to use it in
many cases. Please note that some of Japanese still insist on using
ISO-2022-JP (especially on mailing lists which don't handle UTF-8 well).

-- 
Hiroyuki Yamamoto <hiro-y at kcn.ne.jp>