Internationalization

CustomMailer can be used to send email in many world-wide languages, but it may take a little work by your and/or your recipients depending upon the language. All the languages of Western Europe and the Americas generally work OK since the 8-bit character encodings and fonts necessary for these are standard in Windows and are supported directly by CustomMailer. However, for Eastern European, Asian, and African languages such as Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. extra considerations are necessary to support the special fonts and encoding schemes that are required. CustomMailer is written in Java, so all its strings are double byte (Unicode), but more things need to be true for an end-to-end double byte solution. The following sections describe each aspect of using CustomMailer for sending mail internationally.

User interface

At present the user interface for CustomMailer (menus, dialogs, prompts, etc.) as well as the documentation for CustomMailer are all in English. Our focus in CustomMailer has been on making sure it supports sending internationalized mail content, and we regret we have not had the resources to translate the documentation or application GUI itself into other languages.

Message template and mailing list input

As delivered, CustomMailer allows you to read message template and mailing list files encoded with the following character sets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 (also known as Cp1252), UTF-8, and Unicode. The first four of these are 8-bit (single byte) standards, whereas Unicode is a 16-bit (double byte) standard. The following table shows the 8-bit character sets supported by CustomMailer.

Table - Eight-bit character sets supported by CustomMailer
US-ASCII = yellow
ISO-8859-1 = yellow + blue
Windows-1252 = yellow + blue + gree

Since it is a Windows application, CustomMailer can read your message template and mailing list files using the Windows-1252 character set, hence, the entire table shown above. This is the "Latin 1" character set that generally speaking supports all the languages of Western Europe and the Americas. CustomMailer also lets you enter message templates and mailing lists directly into CustomMailer from the keyboard or using copy and paste from other applications using the Windows-1252 character set.

CustomMailer can also read message template and mailing list files encoded with Unicode. Using Unicode, CustomMailer can read content in essentially all world-wide alphabets (including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.) and ideographs (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.). At present, Unicode data can only be read in from files. CustomMailer does not by itself support the entry of Unicode message templates and mailing lists directly into CustomMailer from the keyboard or by using copy and paste from other applications (however, see "Additional character sets" below).

The character set used to read your message template is specified using the variable messageTemplateCharset= in the file CustomMailerPreferences.txt located in the CustomMailer 4.0\CustomMailerApp folder (at present you must edit this value manually, a more convenient user interface for changing this value is planned for a future release). If no value is given (the default), then CustomMailer operates in "automatic" mode. In this case, CustomMailer attempts to read your message template with "Unicode", and if successful it assumes the message template character set is "Unicode", otherwise it will use "Windows-1252". If a character set is specified in the Preferences file, for example, messageTemplateCharset=ISO-8859-1, then CustomMailer will read your message template file using the specified character set, and if your file contains characters outside this character set, it is an error. When saving a message template, CustomMailer will use the messageTemplateCharset value if specified, otherwise it will use the character set of the most recently read message template, otherwise it will use "Windows-1252". NOTE: The "Unicode" setting will read either "UnicodeLittle" vs. "UnicodeBig" files, however CustomMailer saves all Unicode files as "UnicodeLittle", as is appropriate on Windows systems.

The character set used to read your mailing list is specified using the variable mailingListCharset= in the Preferences file, and it works the same way as in the messageTemplateCharset above. That is, if a value is not specified (the default), then CustomMailer operates in "automatic" mode, reading the mailing list in "Unicode" if it can, otherwise using "Windows-1252". If a value is specified, the specified character set will be used. When saving the mailing list, CustomMailer will use the mailingListCharset value if specified, otherwise it will use the character set of the most recently read mailing list, otherwise it will use "Windows-1252".

There are various applications you can use to create (or convert to) Unicode files. For example, you can create (or import) your message template or mailing list into Microsoft Word, then selected the "Save As..." menu command, and then change the "Save as Type" pop-up menu to "Unicode text (*.txt)".

As delivered, CustomMailer does not support reading message templates and mailing lists in other international character sets such as ISO-8859-n (n>1), Big5, GB2312, Shift-JIS, etc. However, if desired CustomMailer can be configured to provide this support, see "Additional character sets" below.

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