Writing Emails In Chinese

[COPE2]

I have written several emails to people in Hong Kong with Yahoo via Thunderbird, and the Chinese characters have come out unreadable. What's the best way, or font type to send an email in Chinese via Thunderbird?

[trien27]

I have written several emails to people in Hong Kong with Yahoo via Thunderbird, and the Chinese characters have come out unreadable. What's the best way, or font type to send an email in Chinese via Thunderbird?

It has to do both the recipient's email server & your email server.

I've received some emails where using one browser can't give me all the correct Chinese characters, but other emails I can read correctly, but can't copy & paste the correct characters.

I don't understand either. And it has nothing to do with Mojibake either.

[dali3927]

Besides mentioned above, it probably to do with Thunderbird email client software as well, try to use web mail.

[Beth Reynolds]

It seems that Thunderbird is the probable culprit here. Similar issues have been noted on various forums with regard to TB/Asian character display.

Here are a two suggestions off the top of my head:

• If you haven't already done so, upgrade your Thunderbird client
  
• If Thunderbird is a must, you could always send your emails/messages as an attachment to said recipients
  

[zengcity]

try 'foxmail',a well-known Email client software in China.

[SiMaKe]

The problem may just be with your choice of encoding on your Thunderbird client. With encoding (View->Character Encoding) set to Unicode ( UTF-8 ), almost all my emails are readable. However, when I receive an email from a friend (Taiwanese) who uses a particular traditional character set, it's unreadable until I switch encoding to GB18030. If this doesn't work, you could try different East Asian encodings until you find one that does.

There may be a more universal solution, but I found the above works for me when needed.

[COPE2]

i think i figured out what the problem was. i was trying to write in simplified but yahoo hk only allows traditional, so the characters will not be readable.

[jbradfor]

"yahoo hk only allows traditional"??? HUH?

That makes no sense. What, they have a filter setup that scans for simplified characters, and if they find one they mess up your email? I think not.

Rather, I think SiMaKe nailed it, and it's an encoding issue.

[c_redman]

Maybe Yahoo HK (or just the recipient's browser, email client, or computer itself) just defaults to Big5 encoding for anything. Unicode should be more likely to be readable than GB encoding, but software can sometimes be quirky about these things. The person may not even have simplified fonts available (although the MS unicode fonts should handle anything fine).

If you know the recipient is using a traditional Chinese OS, the best choice may in fact be Big5.

[Jane_PA]

I think writing emails in Chinese depends on several situations.

First, writing Chinese, for me, my school webmail doesn't support Chinese input, so one solution is I use an email client to write email in Chinese, like Outlook Experss or MS Outlook. Another solution is to write Chinese in hotmail or gamil webmail. They both support Chinese type as long as your computer installed Chinese input system.

Second, for receiving Chinese email. My school webmail (strange very much) some times can show Chinese email correctly and sometimes not. I don't know the reason, even I changed the "Encoding" from the right click menu. My Outlook Express works for all my Chinese incoming emails. Sure, hotmail and gmail also work well for reading incoming Chinese emails.