In my previous post, “Hello, Hotmail?” I complained about the fact that Hotmail serves up it’s pages with no charset parameter which makes the browser default to ISO-8859-1, and also since it doesn’t even bother converting emails in other character sets to ISO-8859-1, if you send it a UTF-8 (or other) encoded email, then you just get garbage for any non-ASCII characters.
Well, I recently signed up to the mail.live.com beta, which will eventually replace Hotmail, and I’m very happy to report that it serves up it’s pages at UTF-8!
Not only that, but if you send it an email in a character set other than UTF-8, it’ll convert it for you. Good work, Microsoft! Let’s just hope it comes out of beta soon and everyone can benefit from it.