I thought I had my Russian life covered when I discovered years ago the use of Maschke's Automatic Cyrillic converter. Now, I recently was told that all my text messages overseas are being garbled... What frustration and sadness!!

I typically use my Hotmail account to send SMS messages to the mobile phones of my friends in Russia/Ukraine. I prepare the messages on my PC which is a WinXP machine. When I receive overseas messages, I can run them through the internet Maschke converter quite easily. But, the converter is not available on mobile phones. I have also sent SMS through my phone service on my Pocket PC -- again a Windows based operating system.

How do I conquer this problem so that I can send Cyrillic messages through SMS? Is it the Hotmail servers that create the problem...would switching to Yahoo mail or something else correct the problem? Is it my PC operating systems? Is it simply the USA server network (which is something I cannot control)? Is it my phone service (TMobile)?

I appreciate any thoughts on this....