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Cyrillic (Russian) in Gmail



1. How to send Cyrillic (Russian) e-mail from Gmail

Gmail provides two options for sending non-Western-European texts.
By default Gmail tries to "guess" what is the encoding of the text you typed (this is the first option) and then sends your message using that encoding.

If I type Russian text, Gmail figures it out and prepares outgoing message in Russian encoding "Cyrillic(KOI8-R)".

If I type some Russian and some German, Gmail also correctly decides that the encoding should be Unicode(UTF-8).

If you don't want to rely on such "guessing" or have problems with it, then there is a second option - click on "Settings" at the top left line of options and on that page go down to the option "Outgoing message encoding" and choose their 2nd one - ask Gmail to use - always - UTF-8 encoding for each and every message you are sending.

Whether a recipient will be able to read such Russian e-mail (where Russian text is represented as a text of UTF-8 encoding and not as a text of some Russian encoding) or not depends on the software s/he uses.
Gmail does form correct system header that has encoding specification:
      charset=utf-8

Modern e-mail programs such as Outlook Express, Mozilla (Thunderbird), MS Outlook would show such incoming UTF-8 letter just fine.

If a recipient is not using a mail program but uses modern Web-based e-mail service such as Mail2web.com, then it should be fine, too -. s/he just need to choose UTF-8 encoding in the menu of the browser to read such incoming e-mail:



2. How to read incoming Cyrillic (Russia) e-mail in Gmail

GMail works with an incoming Russian (Polish, Greek, etc.) letter in the following manner:

it always uses UTF-8 encoding, that is it converts all incoming e-mails to UTF-8.

Therefore:



Work around for UNreadable e-mails:


Paul Gorodyansky. 'Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet'