Javier writes:
 > > %    Here is a very small test document which may or may not survive
 > > %    if the current document is transfered from one place to the
 > > %    other.
 > [...]
 > >  German umlauts in UTF-8: äöü

it seems they have made it properly to Spain and back :-)

 > And since the files has been included in the message body and
 > therefore they are transcoded by the e-mail clients, here
 > is a TeX version: ^^c3^^a4^^c3^^b6^^c3^^bc.

thanks yes, i should have put it into the document that way

 > Any ideas about how to ignore BOMs?

BOMs? as in www.bom.com? sorry for being ignorant

frank