[i18n] Horde IMP in Japanese

Fri Jul 25 02:41:18 PDT 2003

I guess I'm asking you if a revision to IMP is possible
so that Japanese messages can be displayed correctly.

The Japanese translation for IMP Webmail is good.
The menus at the top uses Japanese "Shift-JIS"
encoding, which is the standard encoding for
Japanese websites.
Your HTML tag ensures it.... <html lang="ja-JP">

UNFORTUNATELY, the standard encoding for Japanese
E-mail is very, very different.  It is in Japanese "JIS /
ISO-2022JP" encoding.  This is a completely different
code.  If you use Internet Explorer or Netscape,
it will not automatically detect this,
especially when you specify the <html lang="ja-JP">
tag at the top of the web page.

The result is that the message portion ALWAYS displays
jibberish at first.  (Then you need to click something
to fix the encoding on the screen, and you need to
repeat this for EACH message you want to read.)

With IMP Webmail's Language set to "Japanese,"
you are trying to display 2 DIFFERENT ENCODINGS
on the same page, and it looks very, very bad!
This scares away many Japanese users.
(You also use a 3rd Japanese encoding -- "EUC" encoding
in the Inbox summary's Time column.)

A quick solution may be to set no language headers
(neither <html lang="en-US"> nor <html lang="ja-JP">)
and use English (US) menus at the top.
Then you might be able to display the message portion correctly
in Japanese each time.

Another solution might be to download a different version
available at IMP-JP.ORG .

However, I believe the correct way to fix this is to use a pair of
conversion programs within IMP.
1. When receiving, convert all "JIS / ISO-2022JP" encoded messages
     into "Shift-JIS" before displaying them on the HTML screen.
2. Conversely, when sending messages, convert from "Shift-JIS"
     into "JIS / ISO-2022JP" before sending them off.
(And don't use unicode or EUC anywhere!).

I understand there might be some concern about
affecting other languages with this fix.
Can the conversion subroutines be written so that
they are activated only when the user sets
IMP Webmail's language to Japanese?

With you permission, I'm willing to do testing,
some source code review, and Japanese translation.
Please let me know if you can make final revisions
on your end.

Thank you very much.

Thomas Maadie
Interwave Corporation
Email thomas at e-interwave.com
Tel (808) 531-0560
http://www.e-interwave.com