I am running Debian unstable, and I use mutt extensively for reading
mail and GNU Emacs as the editor for the mail client.

Emacs version is 21.4.1 (modified by Debian!) and Mutt version is
1.5.13, where debianized Mutt include patches below.

patch-1.5.11.rr.compressed.1
patch-1.5.4.vk.pgp_verbose_mime
patch-1.5.5.1.nt.xtitles.3.ab.1
patch-1.5.6.dw.maildir-mtime.1
patch-1.5.6.tt.assumed_charset.1

LANG is es_ES.UTF-8 and there is no other LC_* environment variable
defined.

The problem is that Mutt shows properly any message with the correct
encoding, even I see oriental symbols in spam received with the
iso-2022-jp encoding. But when I answer a message with spanish special
characters, Emacs opens and everything starts behaving unproperly.

As an example, I read a message using Mutt, with a line like:

"Lo <accented u>nico que me dice dmesg"

I answer the message, Emacs opens and I see:

"Lo <A with a tilde followed by underscored o>nico que me dice dmesg"

And below, in Emacs status line I see "0" instead of "u", so it seems
like Emacs is not detecting that the source being edited is composed
by UTF-8 characters.

Then I edit my response, send the message, and when receiving the copy
from the mailing list I'd see:

"Lo <?>nico que me dice dmesg"

Probably because Mutt is expecting UTF-8 and Emacs inserted latin-1
special characters in my response.

I tend to think that something in my .emacs is misconfigured but I
don't know what.

Find attached my .emacs.

Any ideas welcome.

Cordially, Ismael
-- 
Ismael Valladolid Torres

http://lamediahostia.blogspot.com/     m. +34679156321
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivalladt  j. ivalladt@jabberes.org