>>>>> Stefan Monnier wrote:

> It seems that the utf-encode call in imap.el is often (always?) applied
> to unibyte data (i.e. streams of bytes, a.k.a already encoded text).

> The reason this is so, is because when reading newsrc.eld, Gnus calls
> mm-string-as-unibyte (lisp/gnus/gnus-start.el:2420).

Gnus saves a newsgroup name in the ~/.newsrc.eld file as a string
like this: