What listserv program supports Chinese and Korean languages?

October 13, 2005 11:13 AM

Is there a listserv program that can be used to send messages in Chinese or Korean? I am a PTA member who has been tasked with looking into this. Many of the students at our school have parents whose primary language is either Chinese or Korean. We would like to be able to send out listserv emails to these parents. Is there a listserv program that would let us do that? (We currently use Mailman. Although Mailman does support a couple dozen languages, Chinese and Korean are not on the list.)
posted by merejane to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

According to this list Mailman supports both Chinese (doesn't say what dialect) and Korean. Or am I looking at a different program called Mailman?
posted by KirTakat at 11:26 AM on October 13, 2005

Mailman doesn't care about what language the emails are sent in. You can send a mail in any language through any mailman list, although it's possible that the recipients won't have an email client that can properly display it. The only time that language really matters with mailman is when mailman displays it's web interface, which is where the "language" setting comes in.
posted by cmonkey at 1:52 PM on October 13, 2005

Thanks, KirTakat. You're right, the list on the Mailman website does include Chinese and Korean. I hadn't realized that. On our web interface, those languages aren't included. (Every language that is included on our interface is on the list on the website, but not every language that is listed on the website is on our web interface. We seem to have some arbitrary subset of the languages listed on Mailman's website.) I have emailed the IT people at our school (we use the school's server) to try to figure this out.

In the meantime, based on your answer, cmonkey, it seems that I should just send a test email using Chinese characters. (I don't understand Chinese at all, but I do have the language pack installed on my computer, so I can type in random characters. Hope it doesn't translate as something too weird!) If that works, then we're fine.

Thanks to both of you for responding.
posted by merejane at 10:00 AM on October 14, 2005