A character set is a computer's version of an alphabet. In the past, the ASCII character set was used almost universally. However, it contains only 128 characters, meaning it is unable to display characters in Cyrillic, Kanjii, or other non-Latin alphabets. To work around language display problems, programmers developed a variety of methods, so many human languages now have their own specific character sets, and items written in other character sets display incorrectly. Eventually, standards organizations developed the UTF-8 Unicode character set to provide a single compatible set of codes for everyone.Most e-mail messages state in advance which character set they use, so Evolution usually knows what to display for a given binary number. However, if you find that messages are displayed as rows of incomprehensible characters, try selecting a different character set in the mail settings screen. If your recipients can't read your messages, try selecting a different character set in the composer options dialog box. For some languages, such as Turkish or Korean, it might work best for you to select the language-specific character set. However, the best choice for most users is UTF-8, which offers the widest range of characters for the widest range of languages.
