Linux native unicode support?

From: AA (a_at_example.com)
Date: 05/19/05 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 07:18:38 -0400

I emailed myself what I thought was an ordinary text file from work.
When it arrived at home, mozilla presented the attachment as
"attachment.bin" in my SimplyMepis 3.3 O/S. Opening it with text
editors revealed garbage. (The file opened fine when I booted to
Windows). Back in Linux I ran "file" against it and it said "data." I
tried running "strings -a" which produced nothing. Finally I was able
to get output using the command "strings -a -e l attachment.bin".

1. Why wouldn't "file" recognize the data as Unicode?
2. Do I have to do something in my setup to let Linux natively
understand unicode? (ie - could it be possible to simply type "cat
attachment.bin" and have text output?)

Thanks.