【蛇】乙巳年戊寅月乙卯日 / 正月十九日
Saturday February 15, 2025

HOWTO Mail

On the web

If you're sending from webbased e-mail like GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo or other webbased mailers, make sure that before sending the mail, you have put the encoding of your browser correct. If not this can cause your email will be unreadable for people who receive your message. Check the Howto view Chinese in Desktop Browsers on how to do this.

Offline

Taken from www.chinesecomputing.com :
Avoiding Garbled Messages
In the early days of e-mail, most of the messanges sent used ASCII and were in English. ASCII only uses 7-bits of an 8-bit byte and anything in the 8th bit could be ignored, changed, or stripped. Unfortunately, many Chinese encodings use that eighth bit as a crucial part of the representation of the character. So sending Chinese through e-mail can result in the characters getting garbled and lost.
As e-mail expanded to a world-wide phenomena, this 7-bit restriction caused trouble even for Western European languages due to their use of accented letters. To overcome this restriction, a system called "Quoted Printable" was invented. In this system the eight bit characters are printed as their numerical value using ASCII numerals using base 16 (hexadecimal) and are indicated as special by prepending an equals sign (e.g. =A3). This 7-bit safe message is then sent. When received, the e-mail program translates the "quoted" characters back into their original form and shows these to the user.
All major e-mail programs include an option to send the message as "Quoted Printable". Users sending Chinese e-mail should be sure to check this option. If the Chinese is still being garbled, users can also try typing the Chinese into a separate document and including it as an attachment to the e-mail.

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