Hello,

> > John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:
> > > In case anyone emailed me from Europe (let alone Asia) and didn't get
> > > a response from me, you should be aware that my ISP invoked a spam
> > > rule last week to deflect eastern Asia spam that relied on blocking
> > > any mail containing any unicode values. -> Content rejected.
> > 
> > Wow!  I am speechless.  In what possible world would blocking off all
> > non-english emails be considered a *good* thing?
> > 
> > Is this common in US ISPs?  I have never heard of it before!
> 
> I would suggest to keep ASCII forever: it is good for typing {}[]'"~`|\/
> quickly and why bother with other encodings?

  I'm starting an off-topic thing, but I just want to know
the ISP John M is using and see what they think they are
doing...

  There seem to be many confusion around here.  In theory,
they can't block 'any unicode values' because unicode has an
external encoding called UTF-7, that uses only 7-bits in
each octect (8-bit byte) in a stream.

  I guess they just block any emails that contains any byte
whose 8-th bit is on.  But that is pretty ridiculous idea;
In some of the 'eastern asia' countries, the *common*
encoding scheme in email only uses 7-bits of in a octet.
So, while you still have a chance to receive unwanted,
unlegible emails, important emails in ISO-8859-n encoding
which happened to contain such bytes, it simply blocked by
the ISP.

  As far as I know, 'eastern asia' countries such as
Mainland China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan don't use Unicode as
their common email encoding scheme.  So, blocking 'any
unicode value' is nothing to do with blocking 'non-english
emails'.  After all, the email has been used in those
countries long before Unicode was made up by some
near-sighted industrial giants.

> PS: ;-)
> PPS: meant half ironically: US-English is my usual programming keyboard
> mapping in spite of being a German and having a German keyboard layout...

  Sorry, but I just wanted to say Unicode wouldn't be great
if we want to add multilingual capability to Squeak :-)

-- Yoshiki