I recommend for all Windows NT/95/98/... users to use the shareware editor textpad available at www.textpad.com.

If you open a file with a name ending with .htm (I keep a "test.htm" for the purpose of mudcat messages) you can type the accented characters as you are used to do - type the accent and then the letter - and textpad automatically converts them to their html equivalent. This works for accented characters like éáòû and so on and also for the German umlauts äöüÄÖÜß

It also offers the possibility to view the file in your browser, so you can check the result.

On the textpad web page there is also the possibility to download add-on clip libraries for many (if not all) html tags. You can, for example, simply select some of the text, then double click on the "Font - Bold"-Entry in the html tag list, and your selected text will be displayed bold.
The clip library also features a list of all the special characters to select from, which is useful for those characters it does not auto-convert, e.g. " or &
You can also create macros - I have one that adds <br> to the end of each line.

That makes it very easy to type your messages, add the formating (bold...), check whether the result looks as you want, re-edit if necessary, and when you are ready, you just select all the text, copy it and paste it into the mudcat message window.

Of course, this message was created that way!

Andreas