The basic testing scheme includes the MUAs under test and all the tools to generate/check the test message, i.e. the message constructor/inspector tool, the tools to type in test messages using keyboard input or using Copy&Paste functions or the special test message generator tool, in order to enable the use of some special test messages set (see Fig.1).

The tests required to be performed are:

test-1 - Receive all 4 test messages tmsg1-tmsg4 and display them correctly (Change Mail Reader Language/Alphabet/Encoding Options if needed)

test-2 - Print all 4 messages tmsg1-tmsg4 to the standard printer

test-3 - Reply to messages tmsg1 and tmsg2, and check that information is returned in the same character set as it arrived in

test-4 - Reply to message tmsg3 using the IUT's "reply including quote of body"

test-5 - Reply to message tmsg3 using the environment's "cut and paste" function to insert the non-ASCII characters into the outgoing message

test-6 - Forward all 4 messages to the originator address

test-7 - Generate, as completely as possible, the same messages from the keyboard of the IUT

test-8* - Check possible text distortion when exchanging by message tmsg5* with different (non-ASCII) Default Language/Alphabet/Encoding setting

test-9* - Provide tests 1-5 for message tmsg6* with UTF-7/UTF-8 Character set

For each test, the possible results are expressed as "pass/fail/maybe", providing the possible explanation to the problems discovered. The final results of testing group of MUAs will be provided jointly with recommendations about how to use properly with the evaluated MUAs, i.e. how to correctly set its parameters, etc.