[Evolution] Problems with umlauts (äöü...) in Evo 1.4.4

[Thomas Plümpe <thomanski gmx de>]

Hi there,

I've been using Evolution 1.4.5 (a texstar rpm) without any problems
under Mandrake 9.1, now under Mandrake 9.2 (which only has Evo 1.4.4 and
no texstar rpm) umlauts get converted to strange characters, such as
this:

dotted  a       o       u       A       O       U
        ä      ö      ü      �      �      �

They look fine while I write the email, but the change is visible in my
SENT box and to everybody I send emails to.

I had the suspicion that this was caused by me boldly sharing the
profile (by symlinking ~/evolution to the ~/evolution folder of my
Mandrake 9.1 installation), so I temporarily renamed the link and
created a new profile under 9.2, but the problem remains.

I've tried killing all evolution processes and changing language related
environment variables (when I noticed that LANG=de_DE under 9.2 and
en_US under 9.1), but upon an evo restart from the console with the
changed variables (LANG and LANGUAGE) I get the exact same behavior.
Going back to 9.1 I find I can send umlauts without any problems. What's
making this all the more confusing is that the umlauts in my name and in
the subject don't get converted (or only occasionally), it's in the body
of the emails.

I've run out of ideas on how to track down the problem and I didn't find
anything helpful wrt this on ximian's evolution support site or by
googling. Any ideas what I might try next?

I'd appreciate every little hint,
Thomas


PS: Is there a way to search this mailing list short of downloading the
whole archive?
PPS: The bug database contains some of this stuff with this being the
most recent: http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=47646 "resolved,
not a bug" from August this year.