Question
ASCII provides character mapping for 128 characters however only 94 are considered as printable characters.
This simplistic mapping system was arguably sufficient for the early days of computer encoding and the World Wide Web but nowadays it is simply unable to provide the vast character conversions the rest of the non-english speaking world require.
ISO-8859-1 is widely accepted as the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP with a MIME type beginning with “text/”.
The first 128 characters of ISO-8859-1 are the original ASCII character-set (7-bit). The higher range of ISO-8859-1 for character codes of 160-255 (8th bit) contains the characters used in Western European countries. However even the ISO-8859 family character sets have disadvantages, specifically that they are limited in size and are not compatible in multilingual environments.
To improve upon this, the Unicode Standard was eventually born. This universal character set covers all the characters, punctuation, and symbols in the world!
UTF-8 is the preferred encoding mechanism of Unicode.
ASCII is no longer the most commonly used character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web as it has been surpassed by UTF-8 (Unicode).
Answer
The core components of the Gordano Messaging Suite have been written to be UTF-8 compliant.
This enhanced language support means GMS is now able to tap-in to the Asian market to entice customers away from MS Exchange.
No changes needs to be made at the server level however if you are using GMS Webmail to access your messages, you should ensure that the relevant character map is installed on your machine/browser.
See Also:
Keywords:unicode utf-8 ansi ascii iso foreign character code sets