naive charset question

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

I'm trying to experiment a little with sending non-ASCII characters in
email.  As far as I'm aware, I've done nothing special to set up the
charset handling for my Emacs or Gnus configurations.

I rather naively assume that if Gnus and Emacs are doing their job
well, I should be able to take a buffer with non-ASCII characters
displayed, stick it in an email message, and at most be prompted for
which of the possible charsets should be used for certain non-ASCII
characters, based on the characters actually used in the message.

No, let me change that statement: I would submit that a user-friendly
multilingual MUA should behave that way by default.  If I want to
mention Kai by his full name and discuss money, I should probably be
thinking "ess-tset" and "euro", not "latin-, uh, wait, let me look it
up again, are they both in the same charset?"  If I want to reply to
and quote a message written in Japanese, the charset selection should
Just Work.
</soapbox>

To make it a bit challenging (perhaps too much so?), I tried inserting
the HELLO buffer (C-h h) into a mail message (in Message mode); the
buffer showed ASCII, Cyrillic, Hebrew and other characters, which no
single 8-bit character set would encompass.  I tried to send the
message; it asked me for a charset, and when I hit "?" I got a bunch
of options, including many that I'm sure would not support some of the
characters in the buffer.

Assuming (again naively) that the default should do something
reasonable, I hit return, and the message was sent.  The message that
arrived in my mailbox says charset=us-ascii.  I tried the same test a
second time, and picked a charset from the list, "arabic-1-column";
the message was immediately sent with charset=arabic-1-column.  Both
messages look wrong in the *Article* buffer, of course.

I didn't find much in the documentation to indicate why my naive
assumption might actually be wrong.  In ognus-0.06, message.texi says
very little about charsets and encoding except "here's how you specify
your choice", and gnus.texi appears to only talk about them in the
context of viewing messages; it seems to be assumed that the reader
already knows how charsets are used.  If message.texi isn't going to
go into it, a pointer to some introductory material elsewhere might be
of use; after all, even some of us ignorant, self-centered Americans
need to know how to communicate with the outside world.

So, how should I, naive in such issues, transmit such a HELLO message
(not an attachment with a byte for byte copy of the HELLO file) so
that a recipient (and preferably one not necessarily using Emacs)
might view it as intended?  Would this have actually worked if I were
sending something that could be expressed using a single charset?  Is
there something about the HELLO file encoding that makes it a bad test
case?

Ken

P.S.  I'm using Emacs 21.3.50 built from the CVS repository within the
last day or so, and, as I said, ognus-0.06.