See also: http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=139625 When trying to send a mail with VM which could be encoded in iso-8859-15, i.e. when the the mail contains German umlauts äöüßÄÜÖ and the Euro symbol €, VM 7.19 running under GNU Emacs 21.3.1 uses charset=unknown for the outgoing mail. The reason is that there is no entry for "iso-8859-15" in vm-mime-mule-charset-to-charset-alist in vm-vars.el: (defvar vm-mime-mule-charset-to-charset-alist '( (latin-iso8859-1 "iso-8859-1") (latin-iso8859-2 "iso-8859-2") (latin-iso8859-3 "iso-8859-3") (latin-iso8859-4 "iso-8859-4") (cyrillic-iso8859-5 "iso-8859-5") (arabic-iso8859-6 "iso-8859-6") (greek-iso8859-7 "iso-8859-7") (hebrew-iso8859-8 "iso-8859-8") (latin-iso8859-9 "iso-8859-9") (japanese-jisx0208 "iso-2022-jp") (korean-ksc5601 "iso-2022-kr") (chinese-gb2312 "iso-2022-jp") (sisheng "iso-2022-jp") (thai-tis620 "iso-2022-jp") ) "Alist that maps MULE character sets to matching MIME character sets.") The attached patch fixes the problem. The patch also adds iso-8859-15 in two other places as well, to fix the problem Egbert Eich <eich(a)suse.de&gt; (CC:) is encountering, adding it to vm-mime-mule-charset-to-charset-alist is enough. But adding iso-8859-15 in the other two places is probably also useful. -- Mike FABIAN <mfabian(a)suse.de&gt; http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。