Email piping to script utf8

When piping an .eml from the command line into a php script, everything runs fine. However, when piping from email, file names of attached emails record as latin1 instead of utf8, e.g. L""pez instead of L"pez. I've done 'php -i' piping from an email and from the command line. What I've noticed and think could fix this is that $_SERVER['LANG'> => en_US.UTF-8 from the command line but not from piping the email. How do I set this environmental php variable so it is set when piping from email?