This page contains information for sending and receiving Japanese email on a Mac. (If you have not enabled Japanese input on your computer, visit the first page of this site first to find out how.) The full site contents is as follows:
There are several choices of email programs with at least some degree of Japanese support, but Japanese email is not an exact science. To support Japanese, an email program has to be able to enter Japanese text as you compose the message, then convert the mail to a common Japanese encoding when it is sent, and finally read mail in all the commonly encountered Japanese encodings. Whether your mail is readable by the recipient depends to some extent on compatibility between what your program sends and what the recipient's can read. Most of the mail clients below have the ability to set the encoding for outgoing mail messages, and also the display encoding for incoming ones. (Eudora is an exception.) In Apple's Mail application, for example, select "Encoding" from the "View" menu. The most common mail encoding in use in Japan is ISO-2022-JP, but other possibilities include Shift JIS and UTF-8 (Unicode). Other programs may have the menu in a different place, but it should work in a similar way.
Mail programs are a bit harder for me to test than browsers or other software, so this list is not complete, and I don't have direct experience with every one of these programs. The safest bet may beto use a client that is widely used (and thus tested and supported) in Japan.
Apple's Mail application included with Mac OS X can send and receive Japanese mail. To use Mail with Japanese, make sure that besides activating Japanese input, Japanese is also one of the languages listed in the languages list in the international preferences pane (as shown on the first page of this site). You can set the encoding for incoming and outgoing messages as shown above. I use this on my home machine.
If you want to switch to Apple's Mail application from Eudora or Thunderbird (described below) and transfer old saved messages to the new program, you might consider Andreas Amann's free Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. This is designed to help insure that your saved messages do not get garbled in the transfer from Thunderbird to Mail, Eudora to Mail, or Eudora to Thunderbird. It says explicitly that it works with Japanese versions of Eudora. I have not tested it, though I have seen problems in test transfers I tried without it, so it is worth a look.
A word of caution for those using Mail to send Japanese mail on a mainly English system: if English is your system's primary language, recent versions of Apple Mail may default to the wrong encoding, causing your message to be garbled for some Japanese users. ISO-2022-JP is the encoding compatible with most Japanese email clients, and in earlier versions of Mail, this was the default encoding for mail with Japanese characters; but in Mail version 2 included with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, the situation has changed: depending on the order of languages in the system preferences languages pane, the default encoding may be set to unicode (UTF-8), which some Japanese email readers cannot yet read. So if you are using this version of Mail with a mainly English system, you may need to set the encoding to ISO-2022-JP manually for each Japanese message you send (bothersome and easy to forget), or change the default encoding using a slightly tricky command-line procedure to alter the way Mail works. For more information on this issue (including the trick to reset the default encoding), see Apple support document 301986. Versions 2 and 3 of Mail, included with Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5 (Tiger and Leopard) both seem to have this problem.
I've also used most or all of the Eudora versions described below over the last fifteen years or so, and am still using Eudora today. But now Qualcomm has stopped selling, developing, and supporting Eudora, and it is in effect merging with Thunderbird; it is probably not a good choice if you are just starting out.
Japanese Eudora. This was a localized version of Eudora for use in Japan. The menus and documentation (as well as the download page above) are all in Japanese. This is no longer being developed or sold, but a final version was created for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), and I have been using that successfully on Leopard. It may still be available for download on the Japanese developer's site.
Open Source Eudora. Starting with version 8, current and future versions of Eudora are actually versions of the open-source emailer Thunderbird (see below), with an interface and features tweaked to resemble Eudora's. This is still in the beta stage of development, and I have not tried it yet.
Older versions of Eudora developed by Qualcomm are no longer sold or supported, and are probably only of historical interest at this point: English Eudora version 6 was able to read Japanese email, but not send it. Eudora versions 3 and 4 that ran under Mac OS 7-9 were able to send and receive Japanese using something called the Japanese Plug-In, developed by Hide Itoh. Before this, there was a fully localized version of Eudora Light with Japanese menus (Eudora Light vers. 1.385J). Some of these programs might work on much earlier Mac systems, but the older versions of Eudora cannot handle a lot of the email sent by recent mailers, even in English. Version 6 may be available as a free download from Qulacomm's site; the older versions are on Qualcomm's ftp server.
I've investigated and/or tested the programs below, but I have not used them much at all. Many allow you to select encodings in the same way you can in Apple's Mail application.
Mozilla is a browser/email package that can send and read Japanese email. Like Apple's Mail application, if incoming Japanese mail is unreadable, you can try to display it in a different encoding--a nice touch. Thunderbird is the Mozilla Project's standalone email program. It has a Japanese version, but I have not tested any version of Thunderbird. If you are switching to Thunderbird from Eudora and want to transfer saved Japanese mail, you might consider using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, described above.
Entourage. This is the mailer in MS Office. I have not tried it, but Office applications provide good support for Japanese, and Entourage has some special features like custom formats for Japanese contact information. To enable Japanese features in office, see the first page of this site.
Powermail by CTM development. Besides being able to send and receive Japanese email, Powermail is able to import and export between a wide variety of email formats. The last time I checked, this included the ability to import Japanese email from Eudora.
Outspring Mail. A new mail program from Outspring, which formerly sold Quickmail. Quickmail had advanced and flexible settings for encoding, but I have not tried the new program.
GyazMail . An attractive, cocoa-based client with English and Japanese versions. Inexpensive too. There used to be more of these small, stylish Japanese clients by individual developers, but this seems to be one of the last still in development.
Mailsmith by BareBones software seems to be one of the few major email programs that does not support Japanese.
I sometimes use my browser to access web-based email services or assign my students to use these services for Japanese assignments. Options include Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail. The latter two have Japanese interfaces available, and Yahoo has a separate Yahoo Japan site.
I've only used one program, Apple's iChat. I've chatted (with other iChat users) in Japanese, and it's seamless. I've also tried video chat between America and Japan, using an iSight camera. Over my home DSL connection, it works very well. When I'm behind my university firewall, on the other hand, I've had problems even with U.S. video connections.
Back to Christopher Bolton's Home Page