How well is UTF-8 supported in email?

Question

How well is UTF-8 supported in various email clients?

I know it was somewhat of a problem five or so years ago -- but is it still something we should worry over?

I am wondering if I should re-encode strings to some other encoding before sending. For example, Russian text would be stored as UTF-8 but when sending email notifications, I could just re-encode it on-the-fly as ISO-8859-5.

Answer 1

Here is a comparison of just about every email client and whether it supports UTF-8

Plus, wikipedia says:

The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommends that all email programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8.

But you can also send an email in multiple formats, if you want.

Answer 2

The only place I've found where UTF-8 can be problematic is Japan, where at least a couple of years ago many web mail services and older mobile devices still couldn't cope with it smoothly. It's a bit sad, particularly as the native multibyte encodings (Shift-JIS, ISO-2022-JP etc.) are uniformly awful.

Other East Asian countries with multibyte character sets may also be affected.