 In the early days, the situation was aggravated by a number of mutually incompatible computer encodings for the Cyrillic script, so that the sender and receiver were not guaranteed to have the same one.Also, the 7-bit character encoding of the early days was an additional hindrance.Some Russian e-mail providers even included Volapuk encoding in the list of available options for the e-mails routed abroad, e.g.,

By the late 90s, the encoding problem had been almost completely resolved, due to increasing support from software manufacturers and Internet service providers.