1. The man page for spamd should mention possiblity for localization, via the /etc/default/spamd file 2. The default /etc/default/spamd file should have an example of localisation (eg. LANG=fr in the provided file) to help users 3. On our system, the report mail is sent encoded in utf8 (which is right), but spamassassin is taking the french texts from /usr/share/spamassassin/30_text_fr.cf (which is right), but that file is latin1 encoded, which produces a wrong result : a latin1 encoded e-mail sent as utf8. Dirty fix : recode the 30_text_fr.cf file (which I did on our server) Proper fix : spamassassin should be instructed that the file is encoded as latin1, read as such, so that perl will produce the right encoding for the e-mail (perl IO supports lot of encodings). The dirty fix can be used purely in Debian, the proper one supposes an upstream improvement (way to set the encoding for a file that contains text that is going to be in the sent report).