When using MIME email package you can specify "utf8" as the encoding. It
will be accepted but it is not rendered correctly in some MUA. E.g. Mac
OS X Mail.app doesn't display it properly while Google Gmail does.

It is confusing since Python itself happily understands both utf8 and utf-8.

The patch adds "utf8" as an alias to "utf-8" encoding which means user
won't need to think twice.

Test case:
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText

msg = MIMEText(u'\u043a\u0438\u0440\u0438\u043b\u0438\u0446\u0430')
msg.set_charset('utf8')
print msg.as_string()

This seems entirely reasonable, helpful, and in accord with the mapping
of ascii to us-ascii.  I recommend accepting this patch or a slightly
fancier one that would also do "utf_8".

There are pobably other encoding names with the same issue of being
accepted by Python but not be understood by other email clients.

This issue also affects 2.6.1 and 2.7trunk.  I haven't checked 3.x.

Has this patch been merged yet?