If you can’ｔ read the following, your mailer (MUA) is broken. End of story.
ワタシワAndrewデス。
With the original poster effectively saying that Linux (and I mean the kernel, not just a distro) will not be internationalized due to one or two spammers is wrong. International helpers (and generally they are volunteers) have posted here before, and we should never cut ourselves off from 70% of the world who do not speak English.
ASCII's time is coming to a close, and confusing two issues (spam vs ignoring all .jp/double byte mails) is simply wrong (and skirting damn close to racism). I'm not going into which MUA is best as I've decided what works for me and you'll be a partisan of another choice, and there should always be that choice. The real issue is that many MUA's are simply and unspeakably difficult wrt HTML (which is how double byte people must communicate with any chance of it being read somewhere else) and how they handle languages in general. Spam is a different issue, and one that must be addressed but separately to languages. This is an English language forum, and substationally that should not change, but cutting off particular language speakers just to avoid spam or faulty or substandard mailers smacks of avoiding the real issue.
What happens if a Hebrew, Hindi or Russian language spammer (or more likely, the English-language spammers that I've nearly universally had in the 11 years I've had e-mail) mails here on a regular basis? The problem of spam is separate to I18N, and should always be considered so. Otherwise, lkml will alienate international developers. As Linus speaks Finnish as his first language (which requires different characters than ASCII* supports in any case) I shouldn't think this being controversial. Hopefully, the mono-linguists amongst us will pipe down and let Linux be truly universal.
Hyvää päivää,
Andrew van der Stock, ajv@greebo.net http://www.greebo.net
SAGE-AU President http://www.sage-au.org.au
* ps remember that ASCII is 7 bits (remember VMS?). Characters above 129 are defined by whoever defines the platform. Try getting a Mac and a PC to agree where ë or ö appear in this space without specifying a particular NLS or using Unicode.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:10 EST