Problems with mutt & charset

Andy Koppe andy.koppe@gmail.com
Sat Feb 20 12:01:00 GMT 2010


Gary:
> For some reason although when I send emails containing certain umlauted
> characters everything looks fine, the recipient sometimes (or possibly
> always, I only know because one person mentioned it) doesn't see the
> characters correctly.
>
> I have the following environment variables set
> LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_CTYPE = "de_CH.UTF-8"
>
> (LANG is en because I want to have my messages in English. Must LC_CTYPE
> match?)

The charsets should probably match. I'm not sure whether the de_CH
instead of en_US in LC_CTYPE makes any difference, i.e. you could
probably just leave LC_CTYPE unset. If you want Swiss German
conventions for everything except messages, e.g. sorting, time, and
money formats, you should set LANG=de_CH.UTF-8 and
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8.


> and within mutt I can see that Mutt has the charset variable set to
> UTF-8 - ':set &charset ?charset' displays 'charset="utf-8"'.
>
> However if I send *myself* an email containing upper case an umlauted A,
> O, or U I see garbage in mutt where the character should be, however if
> I look at the email via webmail it looks fine. Similary if I send a
> friend an email continaing (apparently) any type of umlauted character
> (upper or lower case) they appear to be replaced by spaces. I notice
> that the Content-Type header contains text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1. Is
> that correct? In .muttrc send_charset is unset, so allegedly defaults to
> charset, but that doesn't seem to be the case here for some reason.

I don't use mutt, so I can't really help here, but a mintty user
reported that he had to rebuild mutt against ncursesw (which is now
part of the Cygwin distribution) to get UTF-8 in mutt working:
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=124#c28

Andy

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