> I was just asked whether or not Listserv would handle the sending of
 > mail/newsletters in other languages (other than english) We are
 > starting to explore options with some of our other offices and the
 > possibility of offering say and Italian, German, French mailing. I
 > realize that if I can write in these languages it should be fine, but
 > also what about languages that use different character sets. Thanks.

It can be done.  List subscribers must be set to FullHdr; we achieve
this by using the Default-Options list keyword.  The list keyword
Translate may need to be set to No.

In our experience, avoiding quoted-printable encoding reduces
complaints from those who have problems properly decoding messages.
Apparently most people find q-p is more intrusive than occasional
single characters misdisplayed, whereas they seem to be able to read
around the single character errors, most of the time, if they must.
MTA's are allowed, and even required, to convert from 8bit to 7bit
transfer encodings if they believe the MTA to which they are sending
cannot handle 8bit.  Thus, completely avoiding q-p is a distributed
and virtually impossible problem.

If your lists are moderated, then the editor/moderator who handles the
message "in the middle" must avoid breaking MIME headers, encodings,
&c.

None of this avoids the fact that sending and receiving systems must
both be able to handle the selected encodings/character sets.
E.g. choosing the Windows-1252 might fail for some of your users if
they don't have support for that code page.

Cut-and-paste on many systems seems to blithely ignore differences in
encodings.  E.g. if you cut from MSWord and paste into a Eudora
composition window where Eudora thinks the outgoing message should be
ISO-Latin1, you'll still get smart-quotes and other things from the
Windows-125x code page, completely untranslated.

Dennis Boone
H-Net