Comment 46 for bug 253452

I am also affected by this bug (Ubuntu NBR 9.10). Using this bug report, I could change the encoding and umlauts are now displayed correctly. Anyway, I am really angry that this bug didn't get attention. It's not okay to expect an unexperienced user who doesn't even know what a character encoding is to change such setting. Users just get angry if they see an error message that give them no chance to easily solve the problem themselves. It they are in progress of changing from Windows to Ubuntu (that was the goal of Mark Shuttleworth, see bug #1), they will assume Ubuntu - not Empathy! - to be faulty and will have a bad opinion of Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general for years. Small bugs like this one can cause a severe damage for Ubuntu which is really sad, because the bug could have been solved easily (use Pidgin instead of Empathy as default messenger).

I hope that this bug will be solved until version 12.04 LTS.