Help Getting Email to Communicate in Chinese Characters

[On the Road]

I'm trying to have an email conversation with someone in China. I used Babelfish to convert the English to Chinese characters and cut and pasted them into Yahoo mail. However, when the message appeared in the Sent box it appeared as gibberish. (The same thing happened with a cc to my work mail.)

I figured the problem was a need for Chinese fonts. A search for the tools led to a number of commercial products which cost $60 more, but I thought there was a way to do this for free.

Are Chinese fonts really what I need? Or did I misdiagnose the problem?

[charlie]

1. Not with Yahoo

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/read/read-07.html

If you're using XP, you've likely got the character sets to read Chinese installed already. You just need to find an email service that'll handle it. Google's GMail is one:

http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17091

To see what languages you've got, look at all the menus under View --> Encoding (or Character Encoding) in your browser. If you're missing what you need, you can get them from your install disc (XP) or download them from Microsoft for free.

If you find an email service and the mail still comes up garbled, check the Encoding menu again and manually select the language you want. A poorly coded page can prevent the browser from switching to the proper character set.

[On the Road]

2. Thank You, I Hadn't Seen That

Didn't realize the character recognition had to be in the email system in addition to the browser and the operating system.