This question is increasingly esoteric, as we generally migrate away from text-based email reading. But often, I read and send email using mutt. When I copy something from a web page (usually encoded as utf-8), and then paste it into mutt, I get weird character encodings. Like, \xe2\x80\x9cWhen push .. (for a double quote).
I am using Mutt 1.4.2.3i (2007-05-26);
My shell is GNU bash, version 4.0.10(2)-release (i386-portbld-freebsd7.2);
My .bashrc file has export LANG=en_CA.UTF-8;
In my .muttrc, I specify set charset = "en_ca.UTF-8";
Indeed, in mutt itself, if I type :set &charset ?charset I get back charset="utf-8".
But I still don't get the result I'm looking for: when pasting text into an email, I get incorrect characters. Thanks!
Keep in mind that mutt uses vi as its editor...