Re: [ccp4bb]: Mail & Mime (was attachments)

[Yu Wai Chen <ywc@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk>]

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Dear all,

As one of the original senders (of the big5 set) that caused this
elaborate debate, I would like to clarify a few things, esp. concerning
how this happened.

First let me apologize for causing trouble to readers of the CCP4BB.  It
was not my intention.  I 100% agree with Phil and I thought I have been
using plain text all the time.  I didn't realize the character set
encoding can end up as an attachments that forces people to save before
they can read the message.

I use Netscape Communicator 4.6 on IRIX for email.  Communicator comes
in a package including a web browser (navigator) and a mail program
(messenger).  I myself seldom write email in Chinese so I am happy to
have the mailing program to be set to send English plain text all the
time.  However, the preference setting of the mailing program and the
browser are somewhat shared.  Once you finished reading a web page in
Chinese (which I often do), and you switch to the mailing program, and
the mailing program remembers that you last read a "big5-encoded" page
and automatically set its encoding for outgoing mail to be in big5. 
This is very annoying to me as well but I know of no easy way to check
the encoding character set and change this, in the mailing program,
before you send it out.

Thanks for helping me to diagnose the problem.

BTW, big5 is for traditional Chinese; gb2312 is for simplified Chinese.

Wai
-- 
===================================================================
Yu Wai CHEN, Ph.D. ..................   email:ywc@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
 Centre for Protein Engineering,             tel:+44-(0)1223-402148
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 WWW homepage: http://www.mrc-cpe.cam.ac.uk/~ywc