Sending and Receiving E-Mail in Chinese With Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail as Sending E-mail Client:

Yahoo Mail 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 Yahoo Mail 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	Yahoo Mail as Sending E-Mail Client
Eudora 5.1.1
Hotmail (English)
MyRealBox: Web
Netscape Mail 7.0
OperaMail
Outlook Express 6.0
Outlook 2002
Outlook Web Access
Pegasus Mail 4.02
Yahoo Mail
Total no. of receiving e-mail clients correctly decoding messages sent by Yahoo Mail	9

	Message cannot be read or decoded.
	Message appears correctly as is.
	Message appears as code initially, but if you select Japanese (Auto-Select) from the View/Encoding submenu, it will display properly.
	Message appears as code initially, but if you select Japanese (Shift_JIS) from View/Character coding/More/East Asian submenu, it will display properly.
	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.

Yahoo Mail as Receiving E-mail Client:

Yahoo Mail 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 Outlook in all its three formats, Hotmail with English as preferred language, OperaMail, and Yahoo Mail itself do require manual selection of Japanese as encoding format. Manual selection of Chinese as encoding format works with messages composed in Netscape Mail and Hotmail with Chinese as preferred language, while picking Unicode deciphers the two Unicode formats of Outlook Express e-mail.

Sending E-Mail Client	Yahoo Mail as Receiving E-Mail Client
Hotmail
English as Preferred Language
Chinese as Preferred Language
Netscape Mail 7.0
OperaMail
Outlook Express 6.0:
HTML/Unicode
HTML/As Is
Plain/Unicode
Plain/As Is
Outlook 2002:
HTML
Rich Text
Plain Text
Outlook Web Access
Yahoo Mail
Total no. of sending formats correctly decoded by Yahoo Mail	11

Message appears as code initially, but if you select Unicode from the View/Encoding submenu, it will display properly.

Recommendations:

Yahoo Mail 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.