MUAs Testing Results
Product: Elm
URL: http://www.myxa.com/elm.html
Product Contact:
Environment: FreeBSD 2.2
Test date: 1998-03, 1998-06

1. Results of the test
 
Elm
Charset 
 ISO 8859-1  
Latin 1		 KOI8-R  
Russian		 KOI8-U 
Ukrainian		 Windows  
Cyrillic CP1251		 ISO 8859-2 
Latin 2		 ISO 8859-4 
Latin4 
Scandinavian/ Baltic		  
test-1 (Displaying) Pass  Pass Pass Pass      
test-2 (Printing) Pass  Pass Pass Pass      
test-3 
(Replying with non-ASCII A, S)		 Pass  Pass Pass Pass       
test-4 
(Replying with non-ASCII Body)		 Pass  Pass  Pass  Pass       
test-5  
(Replying Copy& Paste)		 Pass  Pass  Pass  Pass       
test-6 
(Forwarding)		 Pass (6) Pass (6) Pass (6) Pass (6)      
test-7 
(Typing on kbd)		 Pass (2) Pass (2) Pass (2) Pass (2)      
test-8 
(Exch non-ASCII default) 		              
test-9 
(UTF7/UTF8)		 Pass  Fail Fail Fail       
Comment:
*
(2) Depends on Terminal Settings
(3) Only Text displayed. Also can reduct 8 bitchars to ASCII
(4) Displaying and processing of message text depends on SETENV and LOCALE. Otherwise display unknown charset in ????
(5) Reject images from forwarded message. However, leave undisplayed characters in original message
(6) Attached images are rejected
(7) Don’t understand MIME (QP, B) in B, S, A

2. Examination of Multilingual features of Mail User’s Agents
 
Elm (FreeBSD 2.2.6) SETUPs and First Examination 
  1. SETUP>CONFIG 
    • enable 8-bit esmtp negotiation
    • enable 8-bit nntp posting
  1. ML support is defined by Font setting in Telnet/Terminal programs (Telnet, F-Secure SSH)
  2. Notes: 
  • Level of user: beginning, intermediate, expert
  1. Setting User’s Environment variables that affect language and charset preferences
# Uncomment this two lines to activate Russian locale 
setenv LANG ru_RU.KOI8-R 
setenv MM_CHARSET KOI8-R 
# Uncomment this two lines to activate Italian locale 
# setenv LANG it_IT.ISO_8859-1 
# setenv MM_CHARSET ISO-8859-1 
# For full locales list check /usr/share/locale/* 

ls /usr/share/locale/ 
ascii fr_CH.ISO_8859-1 nl_NL.ISO_8859-1  
da_DK.ISO_8859-1 fr_FR.ISO_8859-1 no_NO.ISO_8859-1  
de_AT.ISO_8859-1 hr_HR.ISO_8859-2 pl_PL.ISO_8859-2  
de_CH.ISO_8859-1 is_IS.ISO_8859-1 pt_PT.ISO_8859-1  
de_DE.ISO_8859-1 it_CH.ISO_8859-1 ru_RU.CP866  
en_AU.ISO_8859-1 it_IT.ISO_8859-1 ru_RU.KOI8-R  
en_CA.ISO_8859-1 ja_JP.EUC ru_SU.CP866  
en_GB.ISO_8859-1 ja_JP.SJIS ru_SU.KOI8-R  
en_US.ISO_8859-1 ko_KR.EUC sl_SI.ISO_8859-2  
es_ES.ISO_8859-1 lt_LN.ASCII sv_SE.ISO_8859-1  
fi_FI.ISO_8859-1 lt_LN.ISO_8859-1 us-ascii  
fr_BE.ISO_8859-1 lt_LN.ISO_8859-2  
fr_CA.ISO_8859-1 nl_BE.ISO_8859-1
 
3. Free form documenting of testing process

Tested MUA – Elm (FreeBSD)
Reference MUA - Netscape Mail 3.01 Gold
 
Elm READ 
  1. Language/charset support and keyboard/mapping depends Depends on Font settings in Telnet/Terminal
  2. Unsupported charset is filtered to ASCII
    • You can view it according to Terminal settings (command v)
  1. Unknown 8-bit charset is substituted by question marks ?????? (?)
Elm COMPOSE 
  1. Can type Message ADDRESS, SUBJECT,BODY in language and encoding supported by terminal Program/Station and KBD
  2. When typing with uninstalled setenv for RU.KOI8-R you can see typed text reduced/filtered to ASCII
  • But Charset in header is set again to koi8-r
  1. Reply display KOI8-R or it’s reduction to ASCII
Elm SEND 
  1. Send As Is if 
  • SETUP>CONFIG
    • enable 8-bit esmtp negotiation
  1. Send as is but not display unknown characters
Elm RECOMMENDATION