Some of the encodings for mail may run into problems with 7-bit mail nodes. Although they may seem like a thing of the past there are still some of these around I believe. Basically the upshot of this is that if your encoding uses 8-bits of a byte then you may lose meaning on the receiving end. There are a few different ways of encoding 8-bit data including binhex, uuencode, and others.

For starters we should try to expand the set of supported encodings to include at least one chinese encoding. Also it should not be difficult to extend the set of encodings that are supported. These encodings should also be coincident with other CharacterSetEncodings.

Other features that are desirable is having a per person encoding preference. Actually in this case what would be optimal is probably a per mail-address encoding preference, since a person might have different encoding support at work/home. To work well with this, the mail client should possibly use the encoding that the other person sent, if no other is specified. Also if none is specified it may be helpful to store that encoding. This would require an extension to PeopleFiles.