Auto responder perl error - charset

Got a support ticket today from a customer where sending an Email to an account with an autoresponder results in a delivery failure... This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: pipe to |/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond accounts@mydomain.com /home/username/.autorespond generated by accounts@mydomain.com The following text was generated during the delivery attempt: ------ pipe to |/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond accounts@mydomain.com /home/username/.autorespond generated by accounts@mydomain.com ------ Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/perl/524/lib64/perl5/cpanel_lib/Email/MIME/Encode.pm line 72, <$res_fh> line 1.
The auto responder does reply but the subject is a random string of characters. The message is correctly delivered to the mailbox which has the auto responder enabled. So I look at the auto responder and the first thing I notice is the character set they have chosen is "Windows-31j" which is available from a very long list of different character sets. I changed it to UTF-8 and the error went away. So I'm guessing there is an issue with the script that processes the auto responder and this charset. I'm not sure why there are so many to choose from. Most end users don't even know what a character set is - and I'm sure only a very small percentage of my customers would need to set something specific here. It seems like overkill. when it comes to end users I think it's important to keep things as simple as possible. My suggestion here would be to make this field fixed to UTF-8 - so they are not forced to choose something they have absolutely no knowledge of - then have a button or link for those that specifically need a different charset "choose a specific character set for this message".