Encoding for Mail and News?

[Niklas Matthies <matthies@gmx.net>]

Hello,

This is slightly off-topic because not Debian-specific, I hope you don't
mind too much.

A few people and I are debating on what encoding to use for japanese
characters for usenet news (and also for e-mail), because there will be
a new german newsgroup for people interested in Japanese language and
culture. So far, my belief was that iso-2022-jp was the de facto
standard for japanese mail and news messages. The others seem to think
that plain EUC or Shift-JIS are also valid. (That's primarily because
Netscape can understand all of them when used as mail and/or news
reader.)

My question is, what is really used in practice, and where can I find
evidence that using something else would be a bad idea?

TIA,

-- Niklas