The projects aims to obtain a list of mail UAs, with a table stating if these UAs are actually correctly working when configured for different national character sets. Special set of composite multilingual test messages will be designed for testing multiple languages support in mail UAs. Founding of 12000 ECU is requested for ten man months (over ten months period, ending October-November 1998) to perform a testing of popular Mail UAs for multilingual support, producing report and presenting it at TERENA event.
This project will attempt to test some of the more common problems that have been seen in various products, and document these to the community so that the community can choose between good-quality products and not waste time and money buying or testing products that lack basic functionality.
Sometimes multilingual support of E-mail users agents interfere with used multilingual support of OS platform, particularly, language setting. Some multilingual oriented MUAs use internal encoding/transcoding scheme that is not flexible and doesn’t allow to set up national charsets.
Therefore another goal of the project is to propose basic test scheme for testing multilingual support of MUA. This part of the project will collect experience of local volunteer test teams and local problems with languages support by popular MUAs.
Optionally, local E-mail encoding practice will be described (if it’ll be find by local teams necessary). These cases have place in countries that has/use different charset encoding for their languages as it is used for Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian languages in FSU (DOS, Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, etc.) and have place in Central European Countries like Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republik, Hungary etc.
The work actions of the project would be:
The basic test setup will be:
User
|
|
Implementation -----> Message
Under inspector/ <-- set of the test messages
Test <----- constructor
The tests will be performed in at least 2 character sets, one of which is ISO 8859-1, and the other of which includes characters not found in US-ASCII or ISO 8859-1. Some other combinations of comparative testing with setting up other than ISO 8859-1 default character set will be considered during the work.
Additional tests will be provided for MUAs’ Unicode UTF-8/UTF-7 support and, particularly, correctness of their internal transfer scheme between Unicode and non-Unicode charsets.
The test messages are:
tmsg1 - Message with non-ASCII chars in the subject line
tmsg2 - Message with non-ASCII chars in mail address free-form name
tmsg3 - Message with non-ASCII chars in the text (single part)
tmsg4 - Message with non-ASCII chars in text/plain attachment
tmsg5* - Message with ASCII chars with non-English language setting of MUA (optional)
tmsg6* - Message with Unicode chars in text and subject line (optional)
The choice of characters is up to the tester, but messages tmsg3 and tmsg4 should include the full character repertoire in the body, if possible.
The tests that are to be performed are:
1 - Receive all 4 test messages and display them correctly
2 - Print all 4 messages to the standard printer
3 - Reply to messages tmsg1 and tmsg2, and check that information is returned in the same character set as it arrived in
4 - Reply to message tmsg3 using the IUT's "reply including quote of body"
5 - Reply to message tmsg3 using the environment's "cut and paste" function to insert the non-ASCII chars into the outgoing message
6 - Forward all 4 messages to the originator address
7 - Generate, as completely as possible, the same messages from the keyboard of the IUT
8* - Check possible text distortion when exchanging by message tmsg5* with different (non-English) language setting
9* - Provide tests 1-5 for Unicode message tmsg6*
For each test, the tester grades it as "pass/fail/maybe".
The result of the test for each product tested may be documented like this:
| Product: EmDarling 3.27 Beta
from Darling Software under Windows 95 Product Contact: Jim@darling.com Environment: OS (name, version), correspondent Language supplement Test date: 1997-11-01 |
||||
| Charset | 8859-1 | KOI8-R | ISO 8859/2 | **** |
| Rec 1 | Pass | Fail | ||
| Rec 2 | Fail | Fail | ||
| Rec 3 | Pass | Fail | ||
| Rec 4 | Maybe(1) | Maybe(1) | ||
(1)
1. Message could be saved to file, but charset info was lost and content was not converted to local representation; could not be viewed on screen in E-mail reader.
2. Short commentary should be provided
The results will be made available over the Web.
| Item | Duration | Term |
1. Forming International Team that will include representatives from
|
(1 month) | December 1997 |
| 2. Forming list of MUAs to be tested (including different OS platform) | (1 month) | December 1997 |
| 3. Testing arranged MUAs (available, Freeware and Shareware) | (2 months) | March-April 1998 |
| 4. Purchasing and testing some additional MUAs | (3 months) | May 1998 |
| 5. Preparing Intermediate report for TERENA WG meeting in March-June 1998 | (1 month) | May- June1998 |
| 6. Producing report and placing it on the Web | (1 month) | June 1998 |
| 7. Final reporting at TERENA events | September- November 1998 |
4.1. Main principles
4.2. Direct Financial Support needed
| 4 000 ECU |
For 10 man/month work for 5 people (testing, production of report etc.) |
| 3 000 ECU |
For purchasing of commercial mailers |
| 3 000 ECU |
For attendance and presentation at relevant TERENA meetings and final report producing meeting for 3-4 persons from evaluation countries Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, Scandinavia |
| 1 | Yuri Demchenko
Associate Professor, |
Project leader, Principal Investigator (PI) |
| 2. | Konstantin Chuguev
Ural Technical University, |
Project co-leader, PI |
| 3. | Janja Faganel, Slovenia
(from Latin CE Countries) |
PI |
| 4. | PI from Scandinavian Countries
TBD |
PI |
| 5. | Andrew Stesin, System Administrator
Global Ukraine, Ukraine |
PI |
| 7. | Vadim Shevchenko,
Kiev Polytechnic Institute |
Volunteer |
| 8. | Alexey Medvedev,
Kiev Polytechnic Institute |
Volunteer |
International character of the project and it’s wide geographical range promise appearance of some topical problems caused by different languages, cultural contents and usage practice. It is expected that real results will excel outlined schedule and tasks. Notwithstanding of prospective implementation Unicode UTF-8/UTF-7 everywhere, problem with working in multiple languages and charsets environment will remain topical for a long time. Set of multilingual test messages should be documented and recommended as testbed for forthcoming MUAs for developers and users. Next project (or next activity of the project group) could deal/concern with formulating recommendation and providing guidance for wide use of Unicode and means for mail exchange between MUAs using Unicode UTF-8/UTF-7 and non-Unicode MUAs.
LIST of MUAs to be tested (subject for discussion)
* Shopping list for MUA to be tested will be defined
E-mail UAs related information:
1.http://cad.ntu-kpi.kiev.ua/multiling/ml-mua/
3. http://tucows.rinet.ru/pub/tucows
4. http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/email/client-table.html