Dealing with non-ASCII Character Sets

This is one of the more pesky configuration issues when using mutt - and many other console programs - and getting this part of your configuration will take the combination of several properly configured environments, including your console or xterm depending on which environment you use, the locale settings for your machine and user account, and even the fonts available to your system for displaying those characters. Your editor comes into play as well, as it must be capable of producing and properly encoding the non-Western characters you use. It's a big topic and merits a Woodnotes guide unto itself, and I'm working on one at the moment⁷ so I'll put the basics here and refer you to sources better than this guide for more information.

Start with the mutt wiki article about foreign character sets, which is the most complete source of information on this topic that I know of (see sec. 5). It tells you how to set your $LOCALE variables in your bash shell configuration. That is, if you modify .bashrc and re-log in, you will have informed your system that on the console you like to work in a particular character set. More complex character sets (Russian, Polish) may additionally require ensuring the terminal or console has the font necessary to print those characters. Another good site of information on how to use Mutt in UTF-8 mode is available at Rano.org (see sec. 5).

You should, at the minimum, let mutt know what character set you write in. Consider this step optional if you are a native English speaker/writer, but if you write in any other language this step becomes more important. Add a line like the following to your .muttrc to let mutt know the order in which it should search for a character set with all the requested characters in it. It's an ordered list of character sets separated by colons.

set send_charset="iso-8859-1:utf-8"