ISO-2022-JP "Mish Mash"

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I get some emails in Japanese with encoding of ISO-2022-JP which always displays as...well "mish mash"!  I have enabled utf-8 in RC main config without success, as well as enabling mbstring in php.ini also without success. I did have
the following error "  PHP Error: Could not convert string from ISO-2022-JP to UTF-8. Make sure iconv/mbstring is installed or lib/utf8.class is available."

until I commented out certain code in my program/include/main.inc file.

How would I enable ISO-2022-JP in RC?

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Recomplied php-5.3.1 with gettext=/usr/share/gettext and mbstring=all and
everything reads well..

PHEW!!