Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

I am internationalizing a BatchMail program that reads files from a
directory that are encoded using either ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, or Shift_JIS.
I have also tried reading unencoded files for testing.

The program reads the file and sends a mail.

// PARSE THE FILE  -  the program polls a mailbox dir for any new files
input = new RandomAccessFile( file,"r" );
counter = 0;
while ((line =input.readLine()) != null) {    
     get the message, subject, contentType,charset, sender, recipient etc ;
}

My first question is how could I create a japanese string within java,
rather than reading it from a file ?

I think that RandomAccessFile.readLine() is OK, but I'm not so sure. I
think this may be the source of my problem. I could be double
encoding/decoding somewhere here. I want to create a japanese string
within my english java environment, but don't know how. I need this
string for testing. At least I will narrow down the source of the
problem this way.

// SEND THE  EMAIL
if ("".equals(charset) || charset == null) contentHeader = contentType;
else  contentHeader =  contentType + "; charset=\""+charset+"\"";

//set the content mime header
msg.setContent(msgText,contentHeader);


//I have tried the three following ways of encoding a subject, all unsucessfully:

1)MimeUtility.encodeText(vSubject,charset,null);
   msg.setSubject(this.subject);

2) ((MimeMessage)msg).setSubject(this.subject,charset);

3) ((MimeMessage)msg).setSubject(new String(subject.getBytes(this.subject),charset));

So my second question is which of these three is best ? Should I use MimeUtility or setter methods that take a charset?

Do I need to set the Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Language MIME headers or are the defaults OK?

The best i could do was to ignore all javamail encoding altogether in
which case my email/browser could read the message (already encoded as
Shift_JIS or UTF-8). If I set my browser encoding to Shift_JIS or UTF-8
at least the message was viewable. This is similar to viewing the
original file in a browser. I have not used javamail to do any encoding.
The subject line is not readable.

But if I set the Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Shift_JIS" the
message looks wrong (no matter if I javamail encode it or not).

Thanks to all,
Tom