Send characters like é è à in a command line mail I run CentOS 6, and made my first try with the "bsd-mailx" "mail" command line. #!/bin/bash export LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8 echo "Tâches du $( date +"%a %d %b %Y" -d "+1days" )" | mail -s "$( date +"%a %d %b %Y" -d "+1days" )" toto@rktmb.org When current month is "August", "Août" in French, it is just the big mess: characters are not encoded! I tried with mail -a "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" But it displayed right for the body, the subject was screwed yet Then I switched to "mailx": # yum remove bsd-mailx # yum install mailx I tried with mail -S sendcharsets=utf-8,iso-8859-1 And this works!