erinja:

It's the flip side of the Unix geeks in the Esperanto community. I used to telnet into my university Unix server to read my mail using Pine. A faster interface than webmail, less baggage than something like Outlook, nearly 100% resistance to e-mail-borne viruses. Only it didn't support Unicode, so I regularly received e-mails from fancy-pants Unicode users, filled with weird codes and symbols for letters my ssh client couldn't read.

Unicode was invented on UNIX. It's your TELNET client that can't handle Unicode.
Try to use Putty on Windows. (http://www.putty.nl
I believe it's Unicode compliant.

pastorant:
Unicode was invented on UNIX. It's your TELNET client that can't handle Unicode.
Try to use Putty on Windows. (http://www.putty.nl
I believe it's Unicode compliant.

It's a moot point now, I no longer use any mail accounts that have that kind of access. I use Gmail at home and Outlook (blech) at work.

But I believe the encoding was somehow hard-coded into the e-mails, or the server, or Pine itself. The e-mails themselves would have a message at the top that the text had non-ascii-compliant characters, and therefore may not display correctly. Plus I was actually using Putty for a fairly long period!

erinja:I use Gmail at home and Outlook (blech) at work.

Don't knock Outlook until you've experienced Lotus Notes!