Before anything else, remember that there is e-mail software  out
     there  that  is not 8-bit clean.  Next, don't forget that you can
     never be sure what route  your  e-mail  takes  from  you  to  the
     addressee,  nor  that  it  will always take the same route.  That
     means that your message may meet  e-mail  software  that  is  not
     8-bit  clean.  The only fail-safe way around this is to send your
     Japanese message in a 7-bit encoding,  i.e. JIS,  iso-2022-jp  or
     iso-2022-jp-2.   Shift-JIS  and  EUC-JP are 8-bit based encodings
     and may get mutilated on the way.

     Unfortunately, some mail software is a bit over-zealous and  also
     strips  the escape character indicating begin and end of encoding
     changes.  Ken Lunde, wrote a utility  called  `jconv'  that  can,
     among  other things, put stripped escapes back in.  The source is
     at <ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/nutshell/ujip/src/jconv.c> and
     compiles  without any problem.  This same program can also detect
     the encoding used and convert between encodings if desired.

     If you really have to send 8-bit based encoded e-mail and it does
     get mangled, you can try sending it uuencoded.  The receiving end
     will have to uudecode before being able to read  anything.   With
     `jconv'  there  should  not  be  any  real  need  for this clumsy
     approach.

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.