How to send Email with Accented Characters.
Some you may have feared (or hoped) that accents might disappear from the French language under the influence of E-mail. Until recently you could not send accented characters by Email, and if you tried you would see the characters replaced by little squares, which was very annoying and hard to read. Now your worries are over, and the French language has once again been saved from another sinister Anglo-Saxon conspiracy :-) Seriously, there is a solution available in recent versions of all respectable Email programs. Take a moment now to ensure that your E-mail program is accent capable.
If you use Netscape Communicator 4.0 or more recent, choose "Character Set" in the View menu. If the option checked is Western ISO 8859-1, you should be OK. If not, choose set character default and choose that option. The Windows version of Netscape also has a specialfacility for entering accented characters in addition to the ones shown below. Select "Character Tools" in the Tools menu, and then click Insert Special Character. A dialogue box will appear which allows you to click on the desired character and place it in your text. This method is a bit clumsy, but practical for a short message.
If you use Outlook Express 4.0 or later, choose "Character Set" in the Format menu to see if Western (ISO) is the option checked. If not, choose "Preferences" in the Edit menu, and click on "Fonts". In the "Language" box. Then choose "Western European (ISO)" in the "Character set" menu.
Other recent E-mail programs should offer similar choices.
If you have an old E-mail program and don't want to change, or if you can't access the accents from your Email program, you can always compose your French messages in your word processor, and send them as E-mail attachments. But be sure to save them in RTF or HTML format so that the recipient can read them if (s)he doesn't use the same word processor as you do. It would also be prudent to turn off compression of attachments in your Email program in case your correspondent doesn't use the same compression program.