META: international characters and HotMail [was Re: New Conlang: Ai Glwssai]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 09:57:58AM -0700, Garth Wallace wrote:
> No, I get the gibberish too. Looking at the message headers, it appears
> that it was sent without an explicit charset, which my mailreader
> interprets as Windows-1252 (odd, since I'm on Linux...maybe it's a
> concession to all the defective Outlook-produced email out there?). I
Definitely a HotMail problem.  Since it wasn't marked as to character set,
it was assumed to be 7-bit ASCII, so some gateway out there seems
to have replaced all of the high-bit characters with question
marks, at least by the time it got to me.

I tried sending myself a simple all-Latin-1 message from my HotMail account:

        ¡Hola!  ¿Cómo estás?

And it came through as this:

        ?Hola!  ?C?mo est?s?

Interestingly enough, though, when I tried a UTF-8 message, it came through
with HTML entities (even though the content-type was still given
as text/plain):

    Hodiernus dies est ante diem XV Kalendās Iūliās

So I could at least paste that into an HTML file and look at it.

The best luck I had from HotMail was with creating a text file and then
attaching it to the message, rather than pasting into the actual
text box for the message body.  The file comes through with
a generic content type (application/octet-stream), but at least
I can save it and look at it with a text editor and see the right characters.

-Mark