language encoding

[Jim McCloskey]

Hello.

I'm running  GNU emacs  20.7.2 on  two machines (one  at work;  one at
home),  both of which  run Debian  GNU Linux  2.2 (the  current stable
release).   The  installation  on   the  two  machines  was  close  to
identical.   My   emacs  customizations   on  the  two   machines  are
character-by-character identical.

But  they  differ in  their  behaviour in  one  annoying  way. On  the
home-machine,  within  RMAIL,  mail-messages which  include  non-ASCII
character-encoding are  displayed as one  would wish. But on  the work
machine they are  displayed literally (i.e. as sequences  of digits in
the range 0200 through 0377).

When I move the same RMAIL  file from machine to machine, the accented
characters  are  displayed  `correctly'   on  the  home  machine,  but
literally on the work machine.

There must be a difference  in configuration somewhere between the two
systems, to produce this different  behaviour, but I'm at my wits' end
trying to figure out where it might be. The directory

                     /usr/share/emacs/20.7/leim/

has exactly the same content on the two machines.

Is there  anyone who could give  me a pointer  to where I might  go to
track down the source of this weirdness. What else might influence the
behaviour  of emacs when  it visits  the RMAIL  file and  displays it?
I've  been  through the  info  documentation  but  not found  anything
revealing.

By the way,  the difference in behaviour is seen  both in console mode
and under X.

Thanks for any help anyone might be able to provide,

Jim