So, the problem was that in Gentoo vim is encoding text as utf-8. Setting the proper variables in ~/.vimrc did the work. Thanks for helping. D. PS. For future reference : http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?MuttFaq/Charset -- PGP key 39A40276 at wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net key fingeprint: 9A0B 61C6 B826 4B73 69BB 972B C5E7 A153 39A4 0276