Multilingual Browsers & Email Clients

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Stand-alone Email Clients

scribe.gif  Scribe 1.84

A small and fast cross-platform email client for European and Far Eastern languages.

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Font Setup

Click on File : Options : Appearance and select a font that contains the characters you need.

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Character Coding

You can read and write UTF-8 encoded messages and read ISO-8859 or some Windows-12xx encoded messages.  If you put iconv.dll into Scribe's folder then Scribe will convert all of Microsoft's codepages.

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Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Languages

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tabmail.gif  TabMail 2.4

The fastest Unicode-compliant email client to read and write European and Far Eastern languages.

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Configuring TabMail

TabMail can use one fixed-width screen font and one fixed-width printer font at a time.  If you select a WGL4 font, say Courier New, you will be able to see Polish but not Chinese.  If you select a Chinese font, say MS Song, you will be able to see Chinese but not Polish.  You can change fonts in

Preferences > General > Other
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Character Coding

You can read and write UTF-8 encoded messages and read ISO-8859, Windows-12xx, UTF-7, KOI8-R, or KOI8-U encoded messages if their encoding is specified in the message header.

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Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Languages

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thebat.gif  The Bat! 1.61

An email client to read and write European and some Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Turkish.

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Configuring The Bat!

You can set up The Bat! to use its fast but European-only Fixed Width Font Viewer or its multilingual Rich Text/HTML Viewer:

  1. Click on Options.
  2. Click on Preferences.
  3. Select the Viewer tab.
  4. Select your preferred viewer.
  5. Click on the OK button.
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Character Sets

You can change the encoding of received messages in View > Character Sets, and you can set the encoding of a message you are writing in Options > Message Encoding.

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East Asian Languages

Users of Windows 95/98/ME need a third-party CJK enabler such as NJStar Communicator to type Chinese or Japanese.  I do not know how you can type Thai in The Bat!

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becky.gif  Becky 2.0

An email client to read and write European and Far Eastern languages.

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Activating Becky's Multilanguage Support

Becky is installed with a list of available languages but you need to manually associate each of them with an appropriate font and script.  This is how you set up Becky for Central European languages:

  1. Click on Tools.
  2. Click on General Setup.
  3. Select the Languages tab.
  4. Select ISO-8859-2 (Latin2).
  5. Click on the Change button.
  6. Select a font that contains Central European characters, say Arial, Courier New, or Times New Roman.
  7. Select a font size.
  8. Select the Central European script.
  9. Click on the OK button.
  10. Check the UNICODE font option.
  11. Click on the OK button.

Click here for a table with configuration data for Becky's languages.

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Adding More Languages

You can enable Becky to support Microsoft's European and Far Eastern codepages by manually adding them to the list of available languages.  This is how you can add the Greek codepage:

  1. Click on Tools.
  2. Click on General Setup.
  3. Select the Languages tab.
  4. Click on the Add button.
  5. Type "Windows-1253" (without the quotation marks) for the Character Set Name.
  6. Select 8bit, Base64, or Quoted-Printable for the Encoding.
  7. Type "Greek" in the Note field.
  8. Click on the OK button.
  9. Click on the Change button.
  10. Select a font that contains Greek characters, say Arial, Courier New, or Times New Roman.
  11. Select a font size.
  12. Select the Greek script.
  13. Click on the OK button.
  14. Check the UNICODE font option.
  15. Click on the OK button.

Click here for a table with configuration data for Microsoft's codepages.

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How to change Character Coding?

Click on View, Language, and select the language you want to use.

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Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Languages

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Unicode Support

Becky supports Unicode via Microsoft's codepages.  If you associate UTF-8 with the Western script, you will be able to read French in an UTF-8 encoded multilingual message but not Japanese.

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lingo.gif  LingoMAIL 1.0

A light-weight e-mail client that supports Esperanto, Hebrew, and Arabic (but not Persian).  It uses the Windows-12xx codepages for European languages but specifies ISO-8859 character sets in the message headers, which is more or less acceptable for Latin-1 or Turkish but not for Central European or Cyrillic.  Its last build was released in 1998.

Tip:  If you have LAN connection, uncheck the "Dial before send or receive" option in Setup > Preferences > Dialup.

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© 2002 Gyula Zsigri [Home] Last updated:  November 14, 2002