After consulting with experts and much thought, I've decided to change the Digest's "default" character set to UTF-8.
Since UTF-8 in now the default character set for most emails, it's both reasonable and realistic to make it the default for an email-based publication such as the Telecom Digest.
The ISO-8859-1 character set we used to use doesn't have some of the accented characters and commercial symbols which are now in common use: see
More importantly, ISO-8859-1 isn't readily available as a choice on many popular email clients.
There are some exceptions to the usual uses that UTF-8 is put to:, and they are covered in the F.A.Q., which will be reissued and sent in a separate email, in a day or two. For example, The Digest won't allow UTF-8 "Subject" lines, since they can cause problem with the automated process of sorting incoming posts into various files, unless it's required to present accented characters in a person's name or the name of a city.
Bill Horne Moderator