$150 Reward for Japanese Support in SquirrelMail CVS

[Warren Togami]

Any Japanese or PHP software developers out there?

We need Japanese support in SquirrelMail, a PHP based web application that
serves as a web based e-mail client for an IMAP mail server.  SquirrelMail
works great for English and many European languages, but it is currently
totally broken when it comes to Japanese.  $100 of the money is from
Mid-Pacific Institute and $50 is from my pockets.  Total of $150 split among
developers involved.  Details are below.

SquirrelMail Project
http://www.squirrelmail.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren Togami" <warren at togami.com>
To: <squirrelmail-i18n at lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 1:35 PM
Subject: [SM-I18N] $150 Reward for Japanese Support in CVS


> Hajimemashite.
>
> My name is Warren Togami, and I work for Mid-Pacific Institute
> http://www.midpac.edu, a grade 6-12 school in Honolulu, Hawaii USA.  We
> currently have 22 Linux thin clients and over 100 Windows machines for web
> browsing.  We use Squirrel Mail on the student e-mail server.  Last week
> several of our Japanese foreign language classes wanted to use Japanese
> e-mail to correspond with a school in Japan, but Squirrel Mail lacks
> Japanese support so they were forced to use 'romanji', English characters
in
> Japanese syllables for their first week of e-mail to Japan.
>
> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/17797/2002/1/0/7592026/
> I later found this message in the squirrelmail-i18n mailing list about
> "htmlspecialchars for Japanese", but Toshiharu Moriyama's patch was
rejected
> because it breaks Cyrillic and other languages.  Somebody else mentioned
an
> ugly hack in character handling that should be re-written.
>
> ftp://ftp.aqut.homeip.net/pub/sm/
> This URL has his SMJP SquirrelMail specifically for Japanese support.  My
> testing found the following results:
> 1. Only shift_JIS encoding works.
> 2. Display of the "Subject" field is corrupted, showing entirely wrong
> characters.
> 3. Japanese e-mail from Outlook Express to SMJP entirely broken.  I think
> Outlook Express seems to only send UTF-8, which I think SMJP can't read at
> all.
> 4. Japanese e-mail to/from Hotmail and Netaddress (web based services)
works
> if web browser set to shift_jis is encoding, but subject field still
broken.
> 5. SMJP does not seem to automatically change web browsers in
"Auto-Detect"
> mode to shift_JIS.  Hotmail seems to do so most of the time so there must
be
> some way to do it in HTML.
>
> The following goals must minimally be met:
> 1. Subject field display must be fixed.
> 2. Mail from Outlook Express must be readable.  This may be the most
> difficult part.
> 3. Must not break other languages.
> 4. Must support common encodings used in Japan.  Not sure what these are.
> 5. Must be accepted into CVS.
>
> What are the most common encodings used in Japan?  I seem to find
shift_jis,
> EUC, and HTML MIME.  How do any of these relate to UTF-8?  I saw some
other
> encoding that uses HTML unicode codes.  Confusing.
>
> We cannot offer much due to tight budgets, but are willing to donate US
$150
> split among the developers involved in making a permanent solution to
> Japanese that lands in CVS.  The developers decide how to split the money.
> Deadline on this cash reward will be next Sunday, February 10th, 2002.
>
> Warren Togami
> warren at togami.com
> Mid-Pacific Linux User's Group
> http://www.mplug.org
>