On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 11:35:03AM +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> At the moment I still have set the xterm for mutt to ISO-8859-1, i.e.
> receiving and sending messages in ISO. More and more I receive email now
> in UTF-8 and to read them I open another terminal 'urxvt' with the LANG
> set to es_ES.UTF-8 to read such message...
> 
> I'm unsure if I should completely switch to UTF-8 already, maybe this
> would cause big disaster in the receiving sites, mailing lists etc. What
> is the opinion about of other mutt users and what is the tendenz we
> should follow?

  After quite some experimenting (complicated by my using mutt inside
screen inside an xterm, initially with a font not supporting sufficient
UTF-8 characters) I settled on this mutt config:

set assumed_charset="utf-8:iso-8859-1:us-ascii"
set charset="utf-8"
set config_charset="utf-8"
set file_charset="iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set send_charset="us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set ascii_chars

which pretty much defaults to UTF-8 for incoming stuff, backing off to
iso-8859-1 and then us-ascii if needs be, but *sends* in the opposite
order.  Being English and only ever communicating in that language I
have little personal need to use non-ASCII characters so this works for
me.  Anyone needing accented characters probably wants to try changing
send_charset to the same order as my assumed_charset.
  DISCLAIMER: As I said, it took quite some experimenting to arrive at
this configuration and I don't really send non-ASCII, so it's entirely
possible some of the above is non-optimal or in error.

To complete the picture my .screenrc has:

defutf8 on
defencoding UTF-8

I have LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 set on my local machine and the one I ssh to in
order to run screen+mutt.

My .Xresources has:

!! Allow xterm to take note of locale settings
XTerm*locale: true
XTerm*faceName: neep
(and various XTerm*faceSize[1-6] settings)

  Hope this helps someone :).

-- 
- Athanasius = Athanasius(at)miggy.org / http://www.miggy.org/
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           "And it's me who is my enemy. Me who beats me up.
Me who makes the monsters. Me who strips my confidence." Paula Cole - ME

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