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Accents and non-English characters in e-mail messages

ASCII-based accented characters

One of the difficulties in using plain text e-mail is that accented or non-English characters sometimes will not be displayed properly on the recipient’s screen. This is because the original Internet mail protocols (dated 1982) uses the standard ASCII character set, which does not define alternate character sets. The only character set available was US-ASCII, which is sufficient for English.

Whilst the Internet mail protocols have been developed and extended (to ensure the smooth transmission of messages using non-ASCII or non-alphabetic character sets, and non-ASCII character set extensions — accents, diacritical marks etc.), whether accented characters are displayed depends very much on the e-mail system and software that you use.

Messages sent between two CompuServe users, for example, can happily contain accented characters, while some other systems treat them as ‘quoted printables’, and again display them correctly (if your software doesn’t know about quoted printables you’ll see three-character codes beginning with ‘=’ instead, such as ’=3D’). In general, however, e-mail will only carry unaccented characters.

While some people are unconcerned about losing accents on the occasional tête-á-tête in a predominantly English text-based message, it is important to recognise the need for accents when there is a significant amount of accented language in a message, or where the correct meaning is determined by accents. People may feel it is important to include accents in messages sent to EDline or LANGline.

If you are unsure whether accented characters in your message will display properly on other people’s screens, you can either use an ASCII-based scheme to indicate accents (as used in LANGline, for example), or send the original document (which might be a Microsoft Word file, for example) as a binary attachment. The drawbacks of sending binaries are (i) they tend to be much larger than ordinary emails; (ii) you have to know that the recipient has the correct software (e.g. Microsoft Word) with which to open the file; (iii) binary files can contain viruses and trojans; and (iv) it is against Netiquette.

Don’t send binaries to mailing lists or newsgroups unless they specifically state that you can — you’ll get flamed!

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Accented characters in e-mails

When writing accented characters in a plain-text e-mail, it is suggested you adopt the following convention to represent the accent. The character which is accented is typed first, followed by the symbol representing the accent:

/   (slash)

a/

\   (backslash)

a\

^   (circumflex)

a^

~   (tilde)

a~

"   (double quote)

a"

,   (comma)

c,

%   (percentage sign)

o%

aa

aa

sz

sz

f   (the letter 'f')

f

_   (underscore)

a_

ae

ae

'   (apostrophe)

s'

|   (pipe character)

T|

|   (pipe character)

t|

-   (hyphen)

D-

-   (hyphen)

d-

<<   (double left angle bracket)

<<

>>   (double right angle bracket)

>>

!~   (exclamation mark + tilde)

!~

?~   (question mark + tilde)

?~

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