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. In Apple's Mail application, for example, select "Text Encoding" from the "Message" 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.
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 for all my mail now.
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; but in recent versions of Mail, 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'm not sure about Mail version 4.
Thunderbird is an open-source email program from the Mozilla Project. Like Apple's Mail application, if incoming Japanese mail is unreadable, you can try to display it in a different encoding. It has a Japanese version, but I have not tested any version of Thunderbird.
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.
Eudora was the Mac email program of choice in the early days of desktop email, and it supported Japanese from the very beginning, but it has now been discontinued. I include it here out of nostalgia, and because elsewhere on the Web you may find references to using Eudora for Japanese email. If you are currently using an old version of Eudora and want to switch to Apple Mail or to Thunderbird (described below) and transfer saved Japanese messages, be sure to get a copy of Andreas Amann's Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It will help ensure that your saved messages do not get garbled in the transfer. It works with Japanese versions of Eudora, and helped me smoothly transfer tens of thousands of messages from Eudora-J to Mail.
Webmail. I sometimes use my browser to access web-based email services, and I have had my students use these services for Japanese assignments. Options include Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail. All can handle Japanese, and all have Japanese interfaces available.
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