-=> James Bradley wrote to All <=-

 JB> I'm trying to adapt to the Russian Cyrillic font with MultiMail under
 JB> Linux RH-9. (ru_??.UTF-8 something or another was the codepage I
 JB> tried.)

I'm working on UTF-8 support for MultiMail. It won't be in the next
version, I think (coming soon), but hopefully in the one after that. Along
with that should come support for many character sets, including KOI-8.

In the meantime, the only solution is to change the character set of the
terminal. I've come across this myself since I'm using Ubuntu now, where
UTF-8 is the default everywhere -- and even the line-drawing characters
don't work on the console, though they do in an xterm.

Here's what I've written up about it (I've been meaning to post this). This
applies to the console only:

-----------------------------------

As root:

unicode_stop
consolechars -f default8x16

As regular user:

export LANG=C
mm

or

LANG=C mm

Nothing so far works 100% for xterm. (xterm -fn vga -tn linux no longer
works, even though the linux terminfo entry is unchanged.)

Compiling with libcursesw (instead of the above) helps some. The display is
good in unicode mode on the console, except for the diamond, and when in
passthrough mode, which doesn't work. In xterm, it looks better than the
non-wide version. In screen under xterm, for the first time, I actually get
a checkerboard background! I haven't yet checked non-ASCII, non-graphics.

----------------------------------

For Russian, try substituting "koi8-8x16" for
"default8x16", above.* I
haven't any Russian packets, so I can't test this. (Please send me some!) 
In addition to the above, you have to make sure the reader is in a
"passthrough" mode; to make a long story short, if it doesn't look right,
press 'c' to toggle the character set translation. If it still doesn't look
right, you may have to wait for the UTF-8 version.

* Edit: Or use the commands from your followup post. Those look likely. :-)

... "42? 7 and a half million years and all you can come up with is 42?!"
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.46