Re: accented chars. shown as question marks in non-browser tools, sarge

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer@icfo.es>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 13:10:13 -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote:

[...]

> And let me guess - there's no way to automatically determine what
> encoding a given message may contain, and the mutt mail client
> probably cannot switch encodings on the fly. 

The charset should be given in the header of the message. For example,
your last message (the one I am replying to now) has:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=unknown-8bit

I think it would be better to configure mutt differently. Here are the
encoding-related lines from my ~/.muttrc:

set locale="en_US.UTF-8"
set charset="utf-8"
unset strict_mime
set assumed_charset="iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set file_charset="iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set send_charset="us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8"
unset allow_8bit

These settings work for me with English, German, Dutch and Spanish
messages, as well as with the Scandinavian and Eastern European names
that I see in the From: fields on this list. (Russian and Asian
characters in spam messages are displayed as well, but I cannot judge if
they make any sense.)

If you have configured your UTF-8 locale correctly then mutt should be
able to handle all messages that declare their charset properly in the
header. (The "unset strict_mime" above is a partial workaround for a
certain MS program which is known to screw this up.)

If you have problems with this then the first thing to do is to run
"locale" from within mutt and check if it has inherited the right
settings. (Pressing "!" in mutt lets you run shell commands.)

-- 
Regards,
          Florian