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Hosting Services with DBCS-Enabled Webmail?

Posted by Cliff on from the localization-and-internationalization dept.

Dan asks: "I'm looking for an ISP that has double-byte capable Web mail. I have a small personal Web site where I blog on the Japanese game industry. The hosting at my current provider has been perfectly reliable, but I can't send or receive Japanese e-mail through their Web mail system, which can be a problem when I'm on the road. I'd prefer not to switch to a Japan-based hosting service because that would mean a Japanese UI for the Webmail, and I want to be able to give addresses to my friends that don't read Japanese. Does anyone know of a U.S. hosting service that might fill my needs? Thanks for all suggestions."

33 comments

  1. Horde? by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think Horde provides DBCS support. I know it certainly supports a japanese interface. They seem to have lots of i18n support so I would imagine it works.

    1. Re:Horde? by hords · · Score: 4, Informative

      This Web Hosting Company, NatHost, appears to have this Horde Webmail interface.

    2. Re:Horde? by WTFmonkey · · Score: 1

      Wow, that lady has a HUGE hand. Freakish.

    3. Re:Horde? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And tiny feet!

    4. Re:Horde? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i wonder if she is tight downunder.

    5. Re:Horde? by AMystery · · Score: 1

      Coincidentally, I am setting up an email hosting service, I spent today installing Horde. I hadn't put any thought into japanese support and I have no idea what is involved yet but I will look into it more over the weekend. The server should be going live (assuming I don't redo it again) next week so if you want to be a test victim, i can probably arrange it. Let me know if you are interested.

    6. Re:Horde? by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Do they? Or is their webserver just badly configured?

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  2. Verio Signature... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Verio Signature. Right now only available to resellers, but I'm sure it would be easy to find a reseller to buy from. Includes webmail that supports Japanese and English.

  3. What's the problem? by jjhlk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How is it a problem to send that sort of mail on 'normal' servers? Double-byte characters are made of two single-bytes. :)

    Is it a 7-bit byte versus 8-bit byte? I don't how the protocol needs to know anything about your e-mails content.

    1. Re:What's the problem? by sakusha · · Score: 3, Informative

      The answer is: it depends. Any mail system can store and transmit messages made with several different double-byte character encodings. But a truly compatible webmail system would look at the headers, detect the type of encoding (i.e. EUC, ISO-1022), and set the HTML headers to make the browser switch to the proper coding, so it displays properly instead of showing mojibake.

    2. Re:What's the problem? by Etyenne · · Score: 1
      ut a truly compatible webmail system would look at the headers, detect the type of encoding (i.e. EUC, ISO-1022), and set the HTML headers to make the browser switch to the proper coding, so it displays properly instead of showing mojibake.

      More precisely, convert the text from the charset the email is stored in to the one negociated with the web browser (most likely, UTF8). The problem is that some mail client *cough*Eudora*cough* may not specify a correct charset for the body, or fail to encode headers (ie Subject:) correctly. This make your webmail unable to make a meaningful conversion (it don't know the source charset), so your web browser end up showing a lot of ? instead of 8- and 16-bits characters.

      --
      :wq
    3. Re:What's the problem? by sakusha · · Score: 1

      Right. I described that a little bit unclearly, sorry. Obviously I meant that the email headers, which (usually) indicate the text encoding, must be used by the webmail system to present the correct code type to the browser.
      I even made an error, Japanese is ISO-2022, oopsie. That's what I get from going off the top of my head, there are too many damn codes in this world to remember them all with precision.

    4. Re:What's the problem? by Etyenne · · Score: 1

      No prob. I just thought it would be a good idea to shime in as I am currently fighting such an issue with Horde/IMP. Some mail sent from Eudora (older version, I think) don't encode headers properly. Thus, when a subject contain accented characters (in my case, ISO-8859-1), the mail summary is full of ??? as the browser asked for UTF-* but received some part in ISO-8859-1 (and IMP can't do nothing about it as it doe snot know the source charset).

      --
      :wq
  4. .Mac by sakusha · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mac.com webmail supports Japanese, I just got some Japanese email and I checked the web interface (I usually use mail.app) and it works great. I know lots of people using .Mac for blogs.

    1. Re:.Mac by sakusha · · Score: 1

      Since this got modded up, I suppose I should point out that .Mac supports WebDAV and you can upload HTML content from any platform, and of course the webmail is universal as well.

  5. i18n by osewa77 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    [sigh] internalization is one of those things that we developers only start to add on when our code becomes widely popular. If only the programming techniques for adding i18n support were more straightforward.

    1. Re:i18n by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should try programming with Cocoa sometime.

  6. ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by malachid69 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    All ISPs should be capable of supporting Unicode email. For example, a quick google shows that SquirrelMail, WebMail, et cetera all support it.

    Likelyhood is that it just needs configured... For example, look under "Text Encoding" here.

    --
    http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
    1. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by tokul · · Score: 2, Informative

      SquirrelMail supports Japanese, only if you use Japanese translation and php supports mbstring. You won't be able to use Japanese translation, if php does not have mbstring support.

      utf-8 support works only if you use utf-8 translation or if your utf-8 symbols does not contain four bytes or more.

    2. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by malachid69 · · Score: 1
      utf-8 support works only if you use utf-8 translation or if your utf-8 symbols does not contain four bytes or more.

      Is that just a bug in SquirrelMail or in the mbstring support of php?

      --
      http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
    3. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hm, four UTF-8 octets gets all the way to U+10FFFF while three only gets to U+FFFF. I bet mbstring does something stupid like converting to/from UTF-16 without handling surrogates correctly.

    4. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by Cato · · Score: 1

      I just tried configuring Squirrelmail for Japanese on Dreamhost, my web host - I got some Japanese text messages but it didn't work well, and gave a fatal error due to PHP's multibyte support. So I don't recommend that host at least - presumably a web/mail host based in Asia will have the best support.

    5. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by tokul · · Score: 1

      Is that just a bug in SquirrelMail or in the mbstring support of php?

      squirrelmail does not use mbstring to read utf-8. mbstring/recode/iconv decoding is not perfect and depends on specific php modules. SquirrelMail should be able to run without those php modules.

      SquirrelMail uses own functions that convert utf-8 to html codes. developers just need time to go nuts, play with calculator and create complex cycle that works with 4 byte symbols.

      two and three bytes decoding works in most of the cases. I think only some CJK symbols and dead languages use 4 bytes.

    6. Re:ISP that supports double-byte webmail....? by malachid69 · · Score: 1

      Well, if we are talking about UTF-8, the number of bytes is determined by the code point you are trying to represent -- and the specific bytes specify if there is another byte following or not. I have done an implementation converting to/from UTF-8, and it is really very simplistic. However, whether there is 2-3 bytes, 4 bytes, or even 6 bytes is determined by which codepoint is being represented.

      Malachi

      --
      http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
  7. Mail2web.com does Japanese by Dark$ide · · Score: 1

    http://mail2web.com/

    --

    Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.

  8. sad, sad lack of progress by ironfroggy · · Score: 1

    It depresses me sometimes to be reminded at how very slowly things like this catch on. We are stuck in obsolete, bad decisions from the past (like ASCII). The problem is simple: it is easy to do the wrong thing. Why would someone add unicode support when they don't even have to put any thought to just using the ASCII their C-strings compile to?

    --
    Question
    http://www.ironfroggy.com/
    1. Re:sad, sad lack of progress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      C strings compile to ASCII? Heh, evidently you've never used an EBCDIC machine. I hear they're quite popular among Japan mainframe manufacturers.

  9. You can do it w/ Yahoo (POP too) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    mail.yahoo.co.jp Their web mail works.... and if you don't want an account with them, you can use POP on their webmail from any pop server.... and you can do it for free....

    I use yahoo for web-mail when at work. I have them pull it off of my pop server, and they have an option to leave it on the pop server too. So when I go home, all of my e-mail still shows up in my mail client.... Also, you can change the "reply-to" header to anything that you want.... It is a great solution that won't cause you to change providers or e-mail addresses. And it is free!

  10. Myhosting.com by Space+Cow · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have been using them since 1999. Price is reasonable, service is good, and they support DBCS (I use them for Japanese).

  11. Squirel Mail and roll ur own as cgi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Squirel Mail and roll ur own as cgi