Could be because iconv defaults to the locale for
-f and
-t, and OpenBSD only supports the C locale.
Code:
$ file test.txt
test.txt: ISO-8859 English text, with CRLF line terminators
$ iconv -t UTF-8 -f CP1252 test.txt > test8.txt
$ file test8.txt
test8.txt: UTF-8 Unicode English text, with CRLF line terminators
As for mutt, I have
set charset=utf-8 in my muttrc, and characters like é look fine in a UTF8 xterm.