It would be very helpful if one could do
$ iconv -f emacs-mule -t utf8 file
as one way or another, an emacs buffer sometimes gets saved in mule
encoding -- one cannot guarantee it will never happen, and the person
later who discovers the file has been saved that way might not have,
be able to use, or understand the documents of emacs.
This seems to be a suggestion for iconv, so please send it to the
iconv developers. (I don't know who they are.)