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I spent many years maintaining a USENET newsreader, first on BeOS, then on Mac OS X. Being that it's so old, USENET users are often very entrenched in their way

I spent many years maintaining a USENET newsreader, first on BeOS, then on Mac OS X. Being that it's so old, USENET users are often very entrenched in their ways. Chinese users were particularly fond of BIG5 and seemed in no hurry to move to Unicode. I supported around 15 different encodings for displaying messages, yet it was still very likely to see an article that my app wasn't displaying properly. I've never maintained an email client, but I'd bet the situation there is much the same.

fleitz 15y ago
Email is absolutely horrible. Email is where I started to appreciate statistical analysis for charset detection. Email starts with 7-bit characters and rapidly goes downhill from there. Email is also where I started to dislike UNIX devs who think that \n is a proper line ending on networked systems. "\r\n" is not the Windows way, it's the network way. When dealing with email you eventually learn to completely disregard the specs and do whatever works which further screws up the ecosystem for everyone else.