Sending and Receiving Chinese & Japanese E-Mail under Microsoft Windows
This is a guide to writing and reading Chinese and/or Japanese messages for users of English versions of Windows whose correspondence is primarily in English but who sometimes need to send or receive Chinese and/or Japanese e-mail.
Once Microsoft’s East Asian language support and Input Method Editors (IME) have been installed for Windows XP, or Windows Vista , the user can compose and read e-mail in Chinese and Japanese. Once you have opened the message composition window of your email client, simply click on the floating language bar or language button on the task bar. Then select the appropriate language: CN (PRC) for simplified Chinese, CN (Taiwan) for traditional Chinese, and JP for Japanese.
It used to be the case that not all English-language e-mail programs for Windows can read and write messages in Chinese and Japanese. Compatibility of English-language e-mail programs with East Asian languages has been vastly improved since.
As mentioned before, most programs can write and send messages in Chinese and Japanese, and each can also automatically decode Chinese and Japanese message sent by itself and by other programs. If you compose and send a Chinese or Japanese message in either Outlook Express and with the original settings [Western European (ISO-8859-1) as the default character set for outgoing messages], you will get a prompt asking whether you want to send the message in Unicode. Answer yes to send the message properly encoded.
You should encounter few difficulties sending and receiving Chinese and Japanese e-mail if you use any newer e-mail clients. Nonetheless, occasionally someone may inform you that she cannot read your message, or you may receive an indecipherable message. This can be due to a number of potential sources of problems, such as the message header indicating the wrong encoding scheme for the message text, messages sent from older versions of Windows or e-mail programs, mixing traditional Chinese (Big5) and simplified Chinese (Guobiao) encodings in forwarded messages or replies, etc.
To minimize the possibility that someone cannot read your messages, you can change the default character set for English-language POP3 e-mail programs, which is usually Latin Alphabet (ISO-8859-1), to Unicode (UTF-8). Unicode accommodates most if not all of the world's languages. This step is not needed by Webmail programs.
If you get a message that contains a lot of ????, it is corrupted beyond repair. If instead the message displays a bunch of code that looks like gibberish, then it may still be possible to read it.
