Could we use in the final 5.x version utf-8 passwords for authentication?

Still nothing ?

OK, I'll see what I can do about it.

WinSCP has option "UTF-8 encoding for filenames". However users can't login if the server has passwords encoded in UTF-8 and the password contains non-ascii characters.

Could you add option "UTF-8 encoding for authentication"? That would transform the username and password to utf-8 before sending them to the server.

It's still fairly small user group that needs this support. However local policies create automatic passwords that sometimes contain letters åäö. As those are utf-8 encoded the user is unable to login with winscp without first changing the password.