Sending Japanese mail to Japanese Hotmail users using Mutt

While I’m still trying to find way to make Hotmail understand that mail coming from me is not spam, I’m fighting their system against their poor way of converting e-mails encoded using UTF-8.

I usually encode my messages using UTF-8, unless the message is only in English. But here’s something I discovered: the default page encoding of Hotmail depends on the user’s default interface language. Great…

If a Japanese user gets my UTF-8 Japanese mail while using Hotmail, it will display properly. If encoded using ISO-2022-JP (an often used encoding for Japanese-only text), it also displays fine.

But if the user’s interface is in Japanese, ISO-2022-JP-encoded messages will display fine automatically, but not messages using UTF-8 encoding. Even when the user chooses the UTF-8 page encoding in their browser, the message will still look garbled! The only way to see the message properly is to view the source code of the message and select the UTF-8 encoding manually.

So, when using Mutt, after composing my message in JOE, I hit Ctrl-T to manually change the encoding to ISO-2022-JP. (But this won’t work if I write an e-mail that has parts in Japanese and parts in French, because of the letter accents!)

I certainly hope Windows Live will fix all that…