Email encoding

[Sven Bretfeld]

Dear List

I have the following problem with my Emacs email client (VM). When I
compose an answer to a message containing a pgp-signature, my own
reply turns to charset=iso-2022-jp which destroys the german
diacritics of my own and the cited original text.

I put the follwing code to my .emacs:

(setq sendmail-coding-system "utf-8")

But still the coding default for my independently composed messages
(i.e. those that are not replies) comes as iso-8859-1 (like this one).

Can anybody explain this to me? And, more important, can anybody tell
me what I have to do to prevent the shift to
charset=iso-2022-jp.

Thanks for help
Sven