Sending and Receiving E-Mail in Chinese With OperaMail

OperaMail as Sending E-mail Client:

OperaMail can write and send e-mail messages in Chinese using Microsoft’s Chinese Input Method Editors for simplified and traditional Chinese. In the body of the e-mail message, simply click on the language bar or language button on the task bar (this will be present after installing Microsoft’s Chinese language support and Input Method Editors (IME), and by default is indicated by the button EN for English). Then select the appropriate language: CN (PRC) for simplified or CN (Taiwan) for traditional.

Chinese messages sent by OperaMail can be read by all e-mail receiving clients except MyRealBox. Only Outlook Express (HTML/As is) does better. However, a very serious reservation is that OperaMail messages require manually selecting Japanese encoding for all e-mail receiving clients except Eudora, a contingency that the recipient may not be aware of.

Receiving E-Mail Client
OperaMail as Sending E-Mail Client
Eudora 5.1.1

can read

Hotmail (English)

can read

MyRealBox: Web

cannot read

Netscape Mail 7.0

can read

OperaMail

can read

Outlook Express 6.0

can read

Outlook 2002

can read

Outlook Web Access

can read

Pegasus Mail 4.02

can read

Yahoo Mail

can read

Total no. of receiving e-mail clients correctly decoding messages sent by OperaMail
9
 
cannot read Message cannot be read or decoded.
can read Message appears correctly as is.
can read Message appears as code initially, but if you select Japanese (Auto-Select) from the View/Encoding submenu, it will display properly.
can read Message appears as code initially, but if you select Japanese (Shift_JIS) from View/Character coding/More/East Asian submenu, it will display properly.
can read Message appears as code initially after you opened it in its own window. But if you close the message window, select Japanese from the language bar/button, then re-open the message, it will display correctly.


OperaMail as Receiving E-mail Client:

OperaMail is one of the best receiving e-mail client for Chinese messages, reading correctly 11 out of 13 sending formats tested. Only Outlook 2002 does better. Messages sent by Hotmail with English as preferred language, Yahoo Mail and OperaMail itself do require manual selection of Japanese as encoding format by the OperaMail reader.
Sending E-Mail Client
OperaMail as Receiving E-Mail Client
Hotmail  

    English as Preferred Language

can read

    Chinese as Preferred Language

can read

Netscape Mail 7.0

can read

OperaMail

can read

Outlook Express 6.0:  

    HTML/Unicode

can read

    HTML/As Is

can read

    Plain/Unicode

can read

    Plain/As Is

cannot read

Outlook 2002:  

    HTML

can read

    Rich Text

can read

    Plain Text

can read

Outlook Web Access

cannot read

Yahoo Mail

can read

Total no. of sending formats correctly decoded by OperaMail
11


Recommendations
:

OperaMail is an excellent choice for reading Chinese e-mail, but while its Chinese messages can be read by almost all e-mail programs, the fact that the recipient may have to invoke the less than obvious choice of Japanese encoding should give one pause.

Please email me your comments, suggestions, and corrections.


All contents copyright © 2002 Robert Y. Eng. All rights reserved.
With author's permission, republished in CLIEJ.