>>1
You must have a buggy/broken email client or something.
>>4
It does. LFNs are Unicode, so the file is given an ASCII short name, and a Unicode LFN.
>>7
No.
>>9
Unicode 4.0 is perfect, or at least, as good as we could get it (it'll still be improving with time). What's not perfect is the OSes implementation of it; let's see:
Windows 9x/ME (old): No Unicode support in the kernel, mediocre Unicode 2.0 support in GUI applications and filesystem, no real Unicode support in the console subsystem. Lacks an UTF-8 8 bits local.
Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3: Good Unicode 2.0 support in kernel, GUI applications, and filesystem, crappy Unicode support in the console subsystem. Lacks an UTF-8 8 bits local.
Modern Linuces: Mediocre Unicode support overall, due to ancient code breaking with UTF-16, so you have to do UTF-8 most of the time which is slow. Good Unicode support in the console subsystem as far as UTF-8 goes, which is treated as an 8 bits local.