Polite international e-mail

[Kevin McLauchlan <KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com>]

G'day, O knowledgeable ones.

I understand -- and support, I guess -- turning off 
RTF and HTML when posting messages to mailing lists 
and newsgroups. Some people don't have/use readers 
that can interpret them properly, or have limited 
bandwidth available.

However, many of the people in international lists 
like this one have personal names, physical addresses 
and other text associated with them, that rightly 
contain accented characters.

Without RTF and HTML, what is a common format or 
standard that can be invoked -- a sort of least-
common-denominator, I guess -- that will let most 
people send and receive properly accented text?

Does "René Deschênes" spell his name "Rene", or is 
it "René", and he just gave up on the accented "e" 
when using e-mail?  
And, how about his family name? Is there supposed to 
be a circumflex over the middle "e"?
I don't know. I just saw "?" question marks where 
several characters were supposed to be.

I'd like to show people the simple courtesy of 
spelling their names the way their mommy and daddy 
taught 'em, but I don't want to be impolite to those 
who haven't got high-end mail-readers (unless they're 
just Luddites, in which case... screw 'em... :-).

What do you non-American folks do when corresponding 
across borders among yourselves.  What does anybody 
do when discussing translations?  Do you all keep 
reminding yourselves to switch RTF and/or HTML on 
and off?  Or ...

Is there some MIME-type or other encoding that I've 
overlooked, that would be satisfactory for 90% of 
the people?
Is Unicode any kind of option with respect to e-mail?

Thanks for any insights and unaccented suggestions.

/k