Can you point to specifics?

I agree it's all confusing, but they do have different meanings.  "Character set" refers to UTF-8 and the like, whereas "character encoding" refers to things like Quoted-Printable and Base64.  If we're getting *that* mixed up then yes it should be fixed.

Argh, no, it's all correct after checking the places that I have found.
Sorry for the noise, and I should check for correct usage in the new user docs.

I was too quick.

"View > Character encoding" lists stuff as ISO-8859 and UTF-8:
#: ../mail/e-mail-reader.c:2175
msgid "Ch_aracter Encoding"

Same for "Edit > Preferences > Mail Preferences > Message Display > Default character encoding":
#: ../mail/mail-config.ui.h:34
msgid "Default character e_ncoding:"

In composer, there is "Options > Character Encoding":
#: ../composer/e-composer-actions.c:333
msgid "Character _Encoding"

Don't know where to find
#: ../widgets/misc/e-charset-combo-box.c:96
msgid "Character Encoding"
in the UI.

Reopening.

"Edit > Preferences > Composer Preferences > Default Behavior > Character set" is correct.

Note to myself: The introduction of http://tecnocode.co.uk/2011/08/27/character-encoding-and-locales/ explains these terms.

(In reply to comment #1)
> Can you point to specifics?
> 
> I agree it's all confusing, but they do have different meanings.  "Character
> set" refers to UTF-8 and the like, whereas "character encoding" refers to
> things like Quoted-Printable and Base64.  If we're getting *that* mixed up then
> yes it should be fixed.

Are you sure? See [1], where is explained that they are basically the same. Quoted-Printable and Base64 are used for Content-Transfer-Encoding, especially Base64 has nothing to do with strings, as you encode any binary data with it, thus, if at all, change the only occurrence of "Character Set" to "Character Encoding" and that's it. Nonetheless, it's too late for 3.2 now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding

Character set => Character encoding

Created commit d75f47a in evo master (3.3.90+)