> My first guess is that the file's encoding doesn't match your locale.
> Do you have a non-ASCII locale set?  You can check with:

It seems to be more tricky than I thought. I didn't have a locale set.

When I set one, I can parse some emails with this:

export LANG=en_US.latin-1

Others with this:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Others fail with either of the two.

I can display all messages correctly in emacs though.

  Sebastian