Ok,
I got the sample email you sent me and I've got your answer. The short answer is this: the character set in your email is NOT ISO-8859-1, even if it claims to be.
The long answer (and solution):
ISO-8859-1 reserves the range 0x80-0x9f for control characters. This range is called the C1 control set and contains NO printable characters. Here is an offical code chart from
unicode.org
So, you see your characters (0x92, 0x93, 0x94) are not valid characters in the ISO-8859-1 set.
Apparently, though, Microsoft thought it was silly to leave those 32 characters positions for control characters that are rarely used. So, they grabbed a few for some special purpose characters (smart quotes and some others). Code chart
here They renamed the character set Win1252. It can be thought of as a superset of ISO-8859-1, but it is not EQUIVALENT to ISO-8859-1 because it puts printable characters in the C1 range.
It is error-prone to use Win1252 to send mail to someone using a terminal to read the mail because the smart quotes in the C1 control code range look like... well... control codes to pine and are converted to something it considers printable (~R ~S ~T). It is even more error-prone to send WIN1252 text and *claim* it to be ISO-8859-1. Most text displays properly, with exceptions you noted. Magically, though, the emails will look fine in most Microsoft products because they'll automatically use Win1252 when 8859-1 is specified. Imagine that!
The French accents you mentioned are in the legal range for both 8859-1 and WIN1252, so there is not problem there.
What we need is for pine to pass these characters through. To get pine to pass these through as-is, you need to go into pine config and in "Viewer Preferences", you need to enable this option:
pass-c1-control-characters-as-is
Depending on your pine version, this option may *not* be available. If it isn't, enable this one instead:
pass-control-characters-as-is
Now, back in AbsoluteTelnet, you must change the character set translation to Win1252 so the proper mapping is done. (Options->Properties->Appearance->Translation)
Things should be looking better now in pine.
Whew.....
You don't get this kind of support everywhere!!!
Brian