how to send/receive email in cyrillic

[Edward M Dumanis]

On Sat, 26 May 2001, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:

> baron chivrin wrote:
>
> > thank you.
> >
> > i neglected to say that i am using PCs windows 98 and am sending to
> > russians who are NOT on aol. nonetheless, they often can't read my
> > emails. any clues.
>
> It looks like you're doing your part, so without knowing what software
> they're using and what their settings are, no, no clues. Sorry.
>
>
Let me add my two cents to this discussion.
I experience this problem too often to leave it without attention.
So let me share with all of you my own ways of dealing with it.
I believe that the nature of the problem is in either
1) the e-mail utility of the recipient lacks any Cyrillic encoding
capabilities (e.g., AOL), or
2) it has Cyrillic encoding but limited only to the encodings
which do not include the encoding of the sender (e.g., earlier versions of
browsers that do not provide Unicode encoding), or
3) a bug in the software for the recipient's e-mail utility (e.g.,
Messenger in Netscape Communicator 4.5 and maybe some other versions)

Solutions for the recipient:
1) Even if you use AOL as your ISP (Internet Service Provider), it does
not prevent you to load (free of charge) the latest version of Netscape,
Internet Explorer/Outlook Express, or any other favorite browser of yours
that comes integrated with an e-mail utility. Install it on
your computer, and after you have been connected through your ISP,
minimize their browser (left click on the minus box at the right upper
corner of your window), and open the new browser, or just the e-mail
utility (e.g., Outlook Express), and use it to read your e-mail.
In case you cannot open your Inbox from your new installation, get
yourself a new (free) e-mail address on one of the popular/unpopular
e-mail sites (e.g., hotmail.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, netscape.net, and so
on) and forward all your unreadable e-mail to your new e-mail address
which will be accessible by your new e-mail utility, and use the latter to
read it.
2) Upgrade your browser/e-mail utility to the latest one.
3) It depends on the nature of the bug.
E.g., Netscape 4.5 Messenger confuses KOI-8 encoding with code page 1251.
However, I am aware of the 2 tricks to get around if you do not want to
use an alternative browser/e-mail utility to read your e-mail.
The first trick:
Just to go to "File," and "Save As," and save the message as a file. Then
open it using your browser, and choose the correct encoding from your
browser's encoding (character set) menu.
The second trick:
Choose Western encoding (ISO-8859-1) first. (Very important!)
Click "Reply," and only after that choose the correct encoding (Cyrillic
Windows-1251).
The text becomes legible.

Hope it will help.

Edward Dumanis <dumanis at acsu.buffalo.edu>
P.S. Beware of upgrading. It might lack the capabilities of your "tried
and true" software. Try to keep your legacy software available in case
your new stuff does not work as expected.

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