Enabling Unicode Email in Mutt and PuTTY

Unicode and Locale Fun

I still use mutt for my mail but recently rediscovered that on one remote host when connecting via PuTTY, my default settings left the line-drawn threading characters unreadable, which in turn affected scrolling.

The first solution I found was in this forum post. It suggested changing the terminal settings, instead of anything in mutt itself. I added these lines to my ~/.bashrc:

if [ "$TERM" = "putty" ]; then
export LC_ALL=C
else
export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
fi
export TERM=xterm

I then set the PuTTY terminal type (in the Connection -> Data options) to be...

Read the rest of this PuTTY story at ServerWatch