PHPMailer-FE charset - accented characters missing in mailbox

Hi - would very much appreciate some suggestions re:

using PHPMailer-FE on a site - http://www.colorpoli.it/contatti.php

PHPMailer-FE is really good, however I've hit a snag... when messages sent via the mailform arrive in the destination mailbox(es), not only are the accented characters, such è,ò,à, missing but the string in which they are contained are also completely missing - the form entry just not there! When I then send another message with regular characters... no problem. So, the mailform's working ok, but not handling the accented characters.

 
I've changed the meta tag on the php page in which the mailform appears, and also found the appropriate parts of code in phpmailer-fe.php...4th line from last in this code snippet...

function mail_it($content, $subject, $email, $realname, $recipient, $inbound=true) {
  global $attachment_chunk, $attachment_name, $attachment_type, $attachment_temp;
  global $local_chunk, $local_name, $local_type, $local_temp;
  global $bcc, $cc;
  global $PHPMailerLocation, $PHPMailerLiteLocation;
  global $fixedFromEmail, $fixedFromName, $text_only, $htmlCharset;

  if ($realname) {
    $sendTo = $realname . "<" . $email . ">";
  } else {
    $sendTo = $email;
  }
  $ob = "----=_OuterBoundary_000";
  $ib = "----=_InnerBoundery_001";

  $mail_headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
  if ($fixedFromEmail != '') {
    $mail_headers .= "From: " . $fixedFromEmail . "\n";
  } else {
    $mail_headers .= "From: " . $sendTo . "\n";
  }
  $mail_headers .= "To: " . $recipient . "\n";
  $mail_headers .= "Reply-To: " . $sendTo . "\n";
  if ($cc)  { $mail_headers .= "Cc: ".$cc."\n"; }
  if ($bcc) { $mail_headers .= "Bcc: ".$bcc."\n"; }
  $mail_headers .= "X-Priority: 1\n";
  $mail_headers .= "X-Mailer: PHPMailer-FE v" . VERSION . " (software by codeworxtech.com)\n";
  $mail_headers .= "Content-Type: multipart/mixed;\n\tboundary=\"" . $ob . "\"\n";
  $mail_message  = "This is a multi-part message in MIME format.\n";
  $mail_message .= "\n--".$ob."\n";
  $mail_message .= "Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\n\tboundary=\"" . $ib . "\"\n\n";
  $mail_message .= "\n--" . $ib . "\n";
  $mail_message .= "Content-Type: text/plain;\n\tcharset=\"" . $htmlCharset . "\"\n";
  $mail_message .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable\n\n";
  $mail_message .= $content["text"] . "\n\n";
  $mail_message .= "\n--" . $ib . "--\n";

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$htmlCharset is previously defined in phpmailer-fe.php in this line...

/**
 * Used as the charset for HTML emails
 * default is "iso-8859-1"
 * @var string
 * NOTE: Required here, change as needed
 */
$htmlCharset    = "iso-8859-1";

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So, as can be seen, the default charset should be fine for the accented characters in question. I have, however, tried changing it to other charset specs but to no avail.

The problem appears in mailboxes on:

my local mailclient (thunderbird 3.1.6 on W7),
namesco webmail, (http://webmail.names.co.uk)
aruba webmail, (http:/www.webmail.aruba.it)...and...
libero.it webmail

2 of these are italian based for chrissake! Ok Scott...breathe...

I've also submitted a support ticket with namesco (who are generally brilliant!..and where the site is hosted) to ask if there could be anything happening their end, but I'll need to wait til tmrw for a response...

So, there it is - any ideas? Thanks in advance...

Scott