Talk:Unicode and email

Web-based email
Does anyone know about Unicode support in various webbased email services? I know that GMail is UTF-8 by default (hail hail the GMail!) and Yahoo and Hotmail are crappy (the last time tried).

Plus - personal rant:

This rant doesn't have much to do with the article, but i totally, totally love Unicode and i send all my email with it and everyone should do like me. Just set up your mailer to send Unicode by default (btw, it's the default in GMail). Be active, set up an example - tell all your friends. Especially those who are not too knowledgeable with computers - i've done this to some of my friends in their Outlook Express's and no-one has complained yet. If everyone does it, it will become viral and eventually everyone will adopt it. Unicode is just right.

That's it, i should stop wasting precious storage space right now.--Amir E. Aharoni 18:16, 10 January 2006 (UTC)


 * If you are so enamored of the extra functionality and refinement you get with Unicode, I don't understand why you do not also capitalize your entries properly. The first personal singular nominative pronoun in English is spelled "I" not "i". This is a well established rule of English spelling. It is not a matter of personal preference. "i" is simple incorrect in English.Bostoner (talk) 00:03, 1 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Hello Bostoner. If you are going to take the time to edit this Wikipedia page in order to correct somebody on their grammar, then please, at the very least, get your own grammar correct.  But since you obviously cannot, here is a correction to your own grammar: "i" is simply* incorrect in English.  Thank you. -- GurdyMcfluff (talk) 08:46, 5 August 2015 (CT)


 * It is not the default in Gmail. You have to set it. — Omegatron 15:35, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Added paragraph

 * Most modern mail clients support Unicode but it is rarely the default. The bulk of e-mail character representation needs were satisfied just fine by the ability to specify which charset an e-mail was in. Using unicode could simplify a program that only sent e-mail and needed to support multiple scripts but receiving e-mail still requires the ability to deal with whatever charset the sender chooses. (Added to the article by User:Plugwash)

The first line duplicates a line in the introduction. "just fine" is opinionated; Farsi-speaking users weren't handled just fine. Using Unicode is near unavoidable by programs that need to handle a variety of character sets. I just don't see what this adds to the article.--Prosfilaes 20:37, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

SeaMonkey & Opera
How to configure SeaMonkey and Opera mail ?

Why not the default?
"Most do not send in Unicode by default,"


 * Why? — Omegatron 15:35, 5 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Because Unicode is not supported by all clients. Clever agents use Unicode when the encodings with broader support do not cover all used characters. It is e.g. useless to send a message containing only ascii characters in Unicode and usually better to use the Latin-* encodings for French, Swedish and other languages covered by those. As Unicode support gets functional even in primitive programs (that might not support Latin-* & co) US-ASCII might become the only other character set worth trying. --LPfi (talk) 09:06, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I removed the dubious tag regarding this issue. Although Unicode (encoded as UTF-8) is ASCII-compatible, it is not compatible with the myriads of alternative character encodings used for languages for which ASCII is not enough. If you are Russian, your e-mail client will probably use KOI8-R by default, even if it can handle Unicode. Likewise Latin-1 is much better than broken ASCII (as in unimplemented UTF-8) for most languages in Western Europe. And those are languages with alphabets similar to the one of American English. --LPfi (talk) 19:05, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Missuse of term 'unicode'?
It seems to me that no email transport sends or receives "Unicode". They send or receive UTF-8 (or UTF-7, as mentioned in the current article), which is an encoding of Unicode. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.91.29.50 (talk) 12:37, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Referring to all the encodings of Unicode as 'Unicode' has become common use. I wouldn't bother correcting it. Even standards documents have started using the term that way. 63.197.247.13 (talk) 21:31, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Conflating two topics
The article fails to distinguish between the use of Unicode with the old MIME protocol and the use of Unicode with the new Internationalization support. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:40, 7 October 2015 (UTC)