Important! As it was noted in the section of my site called
there is no reason to read about thetune-up for these programs if you haven't learned yet about Windowsitself - Cyrillic fonts and Russian encodings. It is covered in a section of my site called"Cyrillic fonts and encodings under Windows".
That is, it's assumed that you have your Cyrillic fonts activated and become familiar with Cyrillic encodings used underMS Windows. It's also assumed that you have Russian
keyboard tools activated as described in the"Russian Keyboard" section of my site, if you are going to write in Russian inNetscape 6,7/Mozilla.
This page provides the instructions for using Russian in
Netscape ver. 6, ver. 7, and Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey):
in browser itself, in Mail/News, in the built-in HTML editor "Composer".
The settings for Cyrillic (Russian) are the same in
The path to Mozilla's user-specific files
Here are the steps (with Mozilla just being installed and closed):
1. Bookmarks
Netscape 4.x file name for the bookmarks is Bookmark.htm while new versions of Netscape as well as Mozilla
use another
If you have your existing Netscape 4.x Bookmark.htm with Russian items in them,
then you should do the following
(Mozilla's own Import will not corrupt Russian data only if you work with a Russian
version of MS Windows or if you performed
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
2. Suggested generic tune-up, not related to Cyrillic
3. Analog of Netscape 4's
Go to
Why? Same reason - if you go to Cyrillic Web sites a lot, it will help you to avoid switching to Cyrillic encoding manually on the sites that do not tell your browser that they are Cyrillic sites.
It will not affect browsing English sites at all - Cyrillic Character Set includes English alphabet letters, so they will be shown just fine.
4. Mail and Newsgroups - Cyrillic tune-up
If you work with Cyrillic(Russian) Mail and/or News a lot, you can choose Cyrillic encoding as Default, otherwise you can choose Cyrillic encoding manually for each message while working with an e-mail or a Newsgroup.
If you want to set such Default in Mozilla SeaMonkey or Thunderbird:
Do not check there the box
It means that whenever you create a new message, you'll have that Encoding already selected in the message preparation window.
Obviously, if you want to send a message with another encoding of the text, then
you'll need manually select corresponding encoding via
See there a box
Leave unchecked another box there - one describing 8-bit symbols
Such setting for Outgoing messages means that whenever you create a new message, you'll have that Encoding already selected in the message preparation window.
Obviously, if you want to send a message with another encoding of the text, then
you'll need manually select corresponding encoding via
Do not check there the box
Not checking that box will give you a flexibility to use other Cyrillic encodings, for example,
if you selected
Another box there, for Outgoing messages -
Cyrillic(KOI8-R) above - it's if you are setting Mail/News for Russian. For other Cyrillic languages,
say Bulgarian, you need to check what the present preferences of that group of users are and
set it to say
8-bit Russian letters in the 'body' of a message, mentioned above, are regular Cyrillic alphabet letters, they are no different
from say German or French accented
There is no need to MIME-encode Cyrillic 8-bit letters in the 'body' of a message nowadays.
Also, MIME encoding makes your text 3 times bigger!
It's because each Cyrillic
letter will be represented as a triage such as
A recipient of your message should see normal Cyrillic alphabet letters in the text of your message
using
These changes are made:
There do the following:
Unlike Netscape 4.x, you can not have a plain text Signature
It's because
So, to have a Signature with Cyrillic in it, you need to have it as an .HTML file
with encoding specification at the
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
The easiest way to do so is in Mozilla (SeaMonkey):
Composer will insert that meta...charset=... line itself.
Click on Inbox folder and go to Edit/Folder Properties.
You will see that the settings made above are in
Do not check there the box "Apply for all messages" - as it was mentioned above, it will let you be flexible among various Cyrillic encodings.
If you check Properties for other folders - Sent folder, Newsgroups folders, you
will also see that encoding choices you've made on the earlier steps of the tune-up
are in effect.
6. New e-mail or Newsgroup message - Cyrillic tune-up
Cyrillic(KOI8-R) is your Default, so after you click on New, you will be presented with
a composition window that lets you prepare KOI8-R message.
You can verify that: in the message preparation window do
If on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default, then
you will need manually select needed encoding for each Cyrillic message via
7. Reply/Forward - Cyrillic tune-up
Cyrillic(KOI8-R) is your Default (set by checking Reply-related box as described above),
so after you click on Reply or Forwards, you will be presented with
a composition window that lets you prepare KOI8-R message.
You can verify that: in the message preparation window do
If on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default for
Now you know how to send Cyrillic messages correctly.
By the way, above, for both New and Reply/Forward modes, I mentioned that
if on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default, then
you will need manually select needed encoding each time you prepare a Cyrillic message
and
Otherwise a program will let you to type Cyrillic text just fine (because message preparation window
is a Unicode
program will make a conversion from Unicode text (UTF-16 encoding) to "Western" and
each Cyrillic letter will be replaced with a '?' symbol, which means
In such situation an author could see those question marks in the SENT
8. Reading some one else's messages - Cyrillic tune-up
Subject lines.
Let's discuss a Subject line with non-KOI8-R letters, that is 'foreign' letters that do not belong to the encoding that you selected as your Default, f.e. French letters while your Default is Cyrillic.
Remember, English letters are never'foreign' - each encoding in the world, being it Cyrillic or Chinese, includes English letters.
Let's take a folder of some Newsgroup ans see what happens with messages
where Subject contains such 'foreign'
Here situation is the same as in Outlook Express - there are two different cases:
You can see whether it's the case via View/MessageSource.
In such case
Such messages will be immediately shown with readable letters both
in the list of Subjects and in the grey pane for a current
Then during the loading of the list of Subjects
So if some Subject contains 'foreign', non-Default-encoding letters, it will not
be readable in the
In the
go to View/Character Encoding and see what is the encoding selected
for this message. For example, it's
But if - rare case - a message 'body' also (not just a Subject) does not contain
encoding information (no system header with MIME-information),
then you will see the entire message unreadable and will need to try several
encodings until you see readable text.
That is! Now you can send and receive Cyrillic messages and browse Cyrillic sites.