Accented characters in Emails

I retrieve text with accented characters from a textarea and prepare the message headers using some user-defined functions and send it using the php mail() function. The accented characters are kept nicely Here's the importants headers i'm receiving from this message Content-Type: text/plain;

        charset="iso-8859-1"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Question #1: how come using 7bit as encoding my accented characters aren't altered ? shouldn't I be using quoted-printable or 8bit?) The real problem is below tough: I'm assigning a text message with accented characters to a variable, again preparing the message headers with functions and sending it with mail(). The ONLY difference with the previous explanation is the text is directly inserted in a variable (not coming from a textarea). receiving same headers: Content-Type: text/plain;

        charset="iso-8859-1"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit BUT this time the accented characters are loss... they're replaced with others ascii code... Question #2: What's wrong ? Both emails are following the same network path from the dest->smtp's->mailbox ... I tried switching the transfer-encoding to quoted-printable but it didn't appear in the message headers- as if my headers were wrong and lost during the route to my mailbox.... (note: I'm using iso-8859-1 as the charset for the webpage of the textarea)