Unicode Explained

• As

an attachment—e.g., in Microsoft Word format. This is usually no different

from using a “normal,” non-Unicode attachment. The recipient needs to know

what to do with the attachment. Beware that attachments are often frowned upon

for security reasons, and they might even be filtered out by firewalls.

• In HTML format, typically as generated by an email program. Effectively, the pro-

gram would convert “special” characters to HTML character references. This is

what typically happens when you try to compose an email message with special

characters in Outlook Express. Although this may solve some problems, it also

causes some. HTML format messages cannot be read by all programs, and they

may affect the classification of your message as unsolicited bulk email, or “spam.”

• As plain text, with message headers that specify the encoding (as explained in detail

in Chapter 10). This is a simple and clean approach. It’s very easy on Mozilla

Thunderbird, for example. If you don’t have that program on your system, you can

download it from the http://www.mozilla.org site.

Figure 1-17 shows a dialog that appears when you have composed a Unicode email

message in Thunderbird. The program asks for permission to send the message as

UTF-8 encoded, which is just fine. In composing a message, you can use, for example,

the Character Map program when using Windows, as explained in “Introduction to

Characters and ...