Hi, i'm using Gnus v5.10.2 from CVS i have set the default charset for reading messages in gnus-group-charset-alist to koi8-r instead of iso-8859-1: (eval-after-load "gnus-sum" '(setq gnus-group-charset-alist (append (delete '(".*" iso-8859-1) gnus-group-charset-alist) '((".*" koi8-r))))) this works most of the time but fails for some articles. i've attached the message for which gnus shows iso-8859-1 in the body, instead of koi8-r. i think that gnus somehow tries to detect the charset of the message body (and the body contains some character unencodable in koi8-r which makes it think that this is iso-8859-1), which it should not do if there's no charset specified in content-type, and it should use the values specified in gnus-group-charset-alist (and maybe others). Best, v.