> What is the best way to provide foreign language support for one of our
> French professors.  He has specifically asked about the use of accents in
> one of the lists he is creating.  Does this depend entirely on the font he
> is using to compose his message or is there something I need to do with the
> language keyword?

There's nothing you need to do, but there are several things that he
AND his correspondents will need to do.

First, both the professor AND the students will need to have mail
tools that support the use of MIME quoted-printable messages using
the ISO 8859-1 character set.  The SMTP mail standard specifically
only supports 7 bit ASCII text, which does not include accented
characters of any kind. MIME and the ISO 8859-1 character set add the
necessary characters for most European languages (note: I SAID MOST.
I know there are a few left out. Sheesh.).  This may require some
tinkering with the configuration (Eudora and Pegasus don't default to
this configuration) and the users need to make the changes in their
own copy, not at a central location (unless everybody is sharing a
LAN-based copy).

Second, make certain that the FULLHEADER option is the default for
the list.  This ensures that the MIME-Version: header (which triggers
MIME processing in most mail tools) is passed through undamaged.

Once those two things are done (step 1 is by far the hardest one),
your professor can send French messages without a care.

David Boyes
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