Well, what I got was a different kind of gobbletygook. I presume it
won't cut and paste ;-) but looking at a message that should be
quoting Icelandic, I'm seeing improbably characters like a capital A
with a horizontal bar across it, embedded in the middle of
words. (This is not a valid Icelandic character.) Even better was the
cute little fraction symbol (3/4) embedded in the middle of the
word. My best guess is that this probably isn't UTF-8 text, but I
suppose it could be a font problem.
Aha - bingo -
export LANG=en_US.iso885915
Now the bizarre symbols are replaced with eths and other Icelandic
characters, and the quoted text becomes comprehensible. (Well, close
to comrehensible, my Icelandic understanding is even more limited than
my systems administration savvy.)
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.
Oh what fun!
Still, it's way better than it's been in ages.
Thank you very much.