A new major version has been under development alongside PHP 5 for several years. This version was originally planned to be released as PHP 6 as a result of its significant changes, which included plans for full Unicode support. However, Unicode support took developers much longer to implement than originally thought, an the decision was made in March 2010[13] to move the project to a branch, with features still under development moved to a trunk.

PHP currently does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; Unicode support is under development for a future version of PHP and will allow strings as well as class, method, and function names to contain non-ASCII characters.

Initial support for Unicode and multiple character encodings (still buggy as of version 1.9)

Internally, Zarafa uses the windows-1252 charset just about everywhere. This means that we're storing the entire subject, to, from, etc in windows-1252. Only at the moment that the message is converted to an outgoing RTF822 message for SMTP, is the charset conversion done to follow various RFC822 standards.

I have my own bug for this on the Red Hat Bugzilla, which made it blocker for me, but I wonder how somebody could write in the 21st century a groupware server which is capable of working only with windows-1251 charset.