Conference 7.286::macintosh

Although we have the Japanese Language Kit installed, we cannot read 
Japanese email. We use Eudora, though I don't think it matters which
mail software we happen to use. My guess is it's getting corrupted by
the mail server. So currently we can only send Japanese text as an 
attachment. This is a limitation as Japanese users don't normally
need to do this to send email within Japan.

One Japanese person sent us mail we were able to read. He said he
used a Shift JIS conversion on his text file before sending it.
I hope to get details from him, but in the mean time, does anyone here
know more about this? All email in Japanese gladly accepted.
(nk@shore.net)

Also, on the subject of attachments, is there a PC/Mac compatibility
problem? For example, if a note is written on a Japanese PC in notepad,
will J-TeachText be able to read it? I'd prefer to avoid the extra 
step of using attachments but if Shift-JIS isn't useful they are better
than nothing.

Neil

Perhaps you just don't have the right character sets installed?

There are several different Multi-byte character sets in use in Japan.
Shift-JIS is one (see http://www.sgmlopen.org/sgml/docs/ercs/sjis.html 
for a description)   EUC is another, and there are also UCS-2 (Unicode)
definitions for Japanese also  (and probably others that I am ignorant
of).   I have no idea which character sets come in the Japanese Language
Kit for the Macintosh.   If the sender and receiver aren't using the same
character sets, you'll have trouble.

Another problem area with mail is that most mail that goes on the Internet
cannot contain 8 bit characters.   This may be why attachments work for you -
the attachments are usually encoded in some format (i.e. MIME) that encodes
the 8 bit characters into a format that only uses 7 bit characters.  Since
most Japanese character sets use the 'eighth-bit', this may be the cause of
your problem.   

Craig