Arch Linux

Sounds good.

Hum, except we get our mail.rc from upstream. Would you care to take the issue up there?

ok, i'll do that and report back here.

Copied from s-nail-users@:

Hello again Georg, sorry for the delay,

|i am using s-nail as an archlinux user and i encountered a problem while
|sending a mail via script from a deamon.
|it turned out that this deamon had no locale set, so mail did not know
|about the charset to use.
|on further investigation i found your option 'ttycharset' and adding
|'set ttycharset=utf8' fixed this problem.
|i'd like to propose this as a standard setting here since i see utf8 as
|a widespread an commonly accepted encoding and thus this setting as a
|sane default.

i don't think that this is a good idea, not only because of what
Predrag said (who seems to be using a very old and super-buggy
version of S-nail and therefore also has a lot of other problems
to face).

But first of all i wondered how your daemon is capable to produce
messages in character sets other than what your locale a.k.a.
LC_ALL / LC_CTYPE [/ LANG] tells it. Or does the script which
then calls S-nail explicitly exports LC_ALL=C before doing so,
overriding the settings used by the daemon?
Unfortunately most daemon manuals i've seen assume an astonishing
level of general Unix environment knowledge, as if everybody would
be a paid full-time administrator / programmer who is familiar
with all the inter-dependencies.

And unfortunately S-nail seems to do so, too.
I've updated the template .rc file of S-nail (which ends up as
`/etc/mail.rc' on ArchLinux) a bit so that it now reads

# [OPTION] Outgoing messages are sent in ISO-8859-1 if all their characters
# are representable in it, otherwise in UTF-8.
# Note: it is highly advisable to read the section "Character sets" of the
# manual in order to understand all the possibilities that exist to fine-tune
# charset usage (variables also of interest: *ttycharset*, *charset-8bit*,
# *sendcharsets-else-ttycharset*; and of course we inherit the $LC_CTYPE /
# $LC_ALL / $LANG environment variables and react upon them)
set sendcharsets=iso-8859-1,utf-8

Note that setting *sendcharsets* should be the solution also for
you, i guess. Or doing something like

echo bla | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 mailx -Aaccount -s sub RECEIVER

may do the trick in a standard way -- i think i'll also add an
according example to the manual.
[Addon: the manual section "Character sets" is already pretty detailed, too.]

I refrain from setting *ttycharset*, however, because in that case
it would be a hard override of the actual real locale environment,
which i guess would irritate even more users. E.g. it would break
my personal BSD (except Mac OS X) installations.
Even for the non-iconv(3) installations (which ArchLinux isn't one
of) we should not do so because different to the current fallback
default of *ttycharset* in this case, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 is
a multibyte encoding which thus may generate decoding errors.
I think i'll make it a compile-time option nonetheless, because of
UTF-8-only environments, like musl-libc. So thanks for bringing
this up.

Ok for you?

That sounds good.