Courier currently uses the nls use flag to enable/disable nls and unicode support Gentoo now has a unicode use flag that could be used for the unicode support. The only part of courier that uses nls is the shared calendaring stuff (pcp subdir of the courier distribution). Courier doesn't seem to like to be told what to do with respect to nls in this directory. It fails building if you have nls disabled on uclibc. Although I don't know that it is uclibc specific, but it probably is because uclibc doesn't have _any_ gettext/libintl stuff. I'm trying to come up with an elegant way to deal with this. So far, I'm just taking out the use_enable nls from the myconf stuff. I haven't been able to build anything above 0.47.1 because of this limitation. I'm working on getting a useful patch to the courier ebuild ready right now (having some other problems with perl, etc.)
Mass re-assign, seems like mail-mta/courier needs a maintainer.
Pretty sure I fixed this in 0.52.2.