International characters in emails

We don't have to sail very far before we encounter names that need more than English letters, such as Île-de-Bréhat or Göteburg. Fortunately the character set used most commonly in word processors and email programs can cope with these, because they use what is usually called Latin-1 , the Western European version of an international standard, ISO 8859-1. But if we go a bit further to Poland, we encounter names such as Łeba and Gdańsk which use letters not in this set at all. Similarly, many of the Turkish names such as Çeşme and Kapídağ cause problems, though some of these are in an allied set called Latin-2 .

For these reasons, most modern programs are going over to the UTF-8 implementation of Unicode which contains characters for every known language (including Indian and Chinese) but has at its base the familiar English 7-bit character set called USASCII - in turn the foundation of internet mail and closely related to ISO 8859. The main MyCA web site uses UTF-8 but this doesn't cause problems because because by and large most programs handle the necessary conversions automatically.

The same doesn't always happen with email. If one person sends using UTF-8 and another is set to Latin-1, then they may see some odd character probably prefixed by Ã. If the opposite happens the person will see a ?.

But help is close to hand. If you receive an email like that, you can, with most modern email programs, see what they intended to send. We give instructions here for two common programs:

Outlook Express: On the View menu choose Encoding and then UTF-8 (maybe via the More option)

Thunderbird: On the View menu choose Character Encoding and then UTF-8.

If you try to send a mail which has characters not in the Latin-1 set, your emailer may well ask you if you want to send it in UTF-8 (Unicode). You can also set your emailer up so that it sends UTF-8 by default, as follows:

Outlook Express: On the Tools menu select Options, then the Send tab and click on the International Settings and choose Unicode (UTF-8) from the pull-down box.

Thunderbird: On the Tools menu select Options, the the Display and Formatting tabs and click on the Fonts button. This will allow you to change the settings for incoming and outgoing emails.

This is all fine if you can get these strange characters in to your email. How do you do that? On a Mac it's rather easier, but Outlook Express on a PC gives you little help - you're probably better off pasting it in from your word processor. Thunderbird is better - go to the Insert menu and click on Characters and Symbols... and you get a very neat gadget for choosing accented characters. But it only works in the body of the email - stick to simple characters for the headers.

Please note: There is currently a problem with Mednet Display and BalticNet Display. The presence of international characters causes an email to be truncated at that point. We are trying to get a solution to this problem.