I asked> I have to use mostly Japanese and English - but I also want to use I asked> German and French under Linux. Mike said>I recommend to use an UTF-8 locale then, for example: Mike said> export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 Mike said>export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 Mike said>export LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8 Now, I have a problem (most probably due to my very basic understanding of Linux but I promise, I will learn it): KMail (KDE?) swallowed all French special characters from an email which I received, they are just left out. OpenOffice doesn't show them either, here they are squares etc. With vi, however, I can see them all correctly. Any hint where to look, what to change ? Thank you Michael p.s. I can also read it when saving as an encapsulated message and then opening with KWrite and switching the encoding to iso 8859-1