Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:41:09 +0900
> 
> Ted Zlatanov writes:
> 
>  > I appreciate all the details and corrections; I thought UTF-8 was
>  > better and more widely useful than it really is.
> 
> Please hang on to that impression.  UTF-8 really is the best thing
> since sliced bread

FWIW, I agree.

> Although in many localizations, Windows defaults to something other
> than UTF-8 (AFAIK) for most text operations (including file system
> access etc)

To set the record straight: AFAIK there's not a single locale where
Windows uses UTF-8 as the default encoding.  Internal operations all
use UTF-16, and file names are encoded by the NTFS filesystem in
UTF-16 (FAT32 uses the locale-specific encoding, and thus can support
only the characters in that encoding).  Clipboard works in UTF-16.
Etc. etc.

> most Windows text applications do fine with UTF-8.

True.  Even Notepad can.  There's a single exception, though: the
shell (a.k.a. console) window.  I cannot get "emacs -nw" on Windows
use UTF-8 as its terminal encoding, nor have other Windows programs
display UTF-8 in the console window.  There's a UTF-8 codepage
allegedly supported by Windows, but if I set the console window to use
that codepage, I get gibberish or a crashed application.  Maybe I'm
doing something wrong.