I'm uncertain if this a Empathy or Telepathy bug so I'm filing this here.
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I know charset handling is a pretty ugly thing when coping with ICQ/AIM, but Empathy's current behavior is really annoying. I live in Germany where many old clients encode their messages in ISO-8859-15 while the newer ones use UTF-8. 

Since our umlauts (ö, ü, ö) aren't valid Unicode nor valid 7-bit-ASCII, Empathy annotates nearly every incoming message with that "(blabla charset problem .. buggy client)" message.

Two ideas:
1) This message should only be displayed once – not below every single message containing illegal characters.
2) You should provide users with a way of defining fall-backs. I for example would prefer "try UTF-8, if this fails, try iso-8859-15, if this fails, try latin-1, if this fails, fall back to US-ASCII")

If the latter is already possible you should document that feature and give it a reasonable default value :-)