Hi everyone,
This is a lazyweb request for those of you who might be using Thunderbird (English) with Japanese email.
In the past, I've used Apple Mail.app and Microsoft Entourage with no problems.
I've just installed Thunderbird and want to have English menus but support of Japanese email. Initially I had set the Character Encoding (Incoming and Outgoing) to Unicode, but that ended up as mojibake, so I'm not sure if I should be using EUC_Japan or Shift_JIS. Any guidance either way would be appreciated.
My understanding is generally you want to set it to Shift-JIS as the default encoding
this will make your e-mail work with those zillion employees still using Netscape 4.7 at their place of employment as well as ALL cell phones.
PS: that's also why most online e-mail services SUCK! Gmail for example, since you can't set the outgoing encoding you can't use it with most of your Japanese friends or any Japanese cell phones.
Hotmail has options. Yahoo used to just leave it in the encoding your browser was set to but I think they might have broke then when they upgraded their interface. Oddpost also has no option, utf-8 out only so no go for Japanese.
I'm also using an English Thunderbird build and have no problems sending or receiving Japanese mail.
This should do the trick: under Tools/Options/Fonts, set "Character encodings" for outgoing and incoming mail both to Unicode (UTF-8) and uncheck (!) the two checkboxes below.
When sending mails to Yahoo, Hotmail, mobile phones or weird Japanese email clients, set the mail's encoding to JIS. In all other cases UTF-8 should do the job.
Andreasのコメントに書いてあるとおりですが、
日本語のメールの場合ISO-2022-JPを使うのが普通です。
as level said, ISO-2022-JP is the standard for email .. it's binary safe (7-bit), unlike utf-8, s_jis, or euc-jp and readable by hotmail, yahoo, and jp mobile phones. English thunderbird supports it out of the box
the following seems to be the traditional methods of use and most compatible w/ jp computers, afaik -
email: iso-2022-jp
web: shift_jis
db/unix: euc
though the latter 2, if you set up things right, can be pretty much whatever encoding you want. email is the only real picky one