german umlauts with e-mail after installing new system

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 15:25 +0200, Alexander Apprich wrote:
> Götz Reinicke wrote:
> > Alexander,
> > 
> > Alexander Apprich schrieb:
> > 
> >> Goetz,
> >>
> >> Götz Reinicke wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> I recently installed a new e-mail-server using taolinux 4 (RHEL4) and 
> >>> got some problems with german umlauts.
> >>>
> >>> That I tested was sending an e-mail from our webmailsystem twig and 
> >>> an other from my thunderbird client.
> >>>
> >>> I got two diffrent results:
> >>>
> >>> sending from twig lets the subject (ö, ä, ü) unchanged, the mailtext 
> >>> is unreadebel.
> >>>
> >>> sending from thunderbird changes the subject to strange symbols, the 
> >>> mail text is fine.
> >>>
> >>> I use sendmail.
> >>>
> >>> Where can I look, for what could be wrong?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> try in a teminal
> >>
> >>    export LANG=de_DE
> >>
> >> then start your mailer and try it again. I had some strange experience
> >> w/ the default de_DE.UTF8 and german umlaute...
> >>
> >> If this fixes your problem, you can change the default LANG in
> >>
> >>    /etc/sysconfig/118n
> > 
> > 
> > This didn't solve the problem, I still get a mismatch off umlauts and 
> > strange characters... :-(
> > 
> 
> What is checked in View->Character encoding in thunderbird/firefox???

Normally servers communicate the encoding they send pages in to web-
clients. With "view->character", you can override the encoding servers
communicate to your client.

The problems you describe, indicate an entirely messed up i18n system or
broken configuration with several origins of problems interacting
simultaneously. 

Normally, with modern RH/FC systems all you want use is "utf8"
everywhere. You should check which encoding it is using to serve pages,
which encoding your system is using, and which encoding you are using.

The symptoms you describe indicate your server sending latin1 encoded
pages, while your server internally is using utf8. 

Ralf