After consulting with experts and much thought, I've decided to change
the Digest's "default" character set to UTF-8.

Since UTF-8 in now the default character set for most emails, it's
both reasonable and realistic to make it the default for an
email-based publication such as the Telecom Digest.

The ISO-8859-1 character set we used to use doesn't have some of the
accented characters and commercial symbols which are now in common
use: see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 for details.

More importantly, ISO-8859-1 isn't readily available as a choice on
many popular email clients.

There are some exceptions to the usual uses that UTF-8 is put to:, and
they are covered in the F.A.Q., which will be reissued and sent in a
separate email, in a day or two. For example, The Digest won't allow
UTF-8 "Subject" lines, since they can cause problem with the automated
process of sorting incoming posts into various files, unless it's
required to present accented characters in a person's name or the name
of a city.

Bill Horne
Moderator

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