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Thunderbird renders all email in Western encoding instead of UTF-8

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by Matt

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I have carefully gone through all the options of Thunderbird and found only one place where the default character encoding is specified, separately for incoming and outgoing. I have set it to UTF-8, the current standard for the world.

However, when mail is rendered in the main viewer, the encoding is set to Western (I can change it manually to UTF-8). Further, "Right-click on subject in mail list "> "Open message in new window" produces a windows that again renders an incoming message as Western.

This behavior is clearly wrong, is a bug, and displays incorrect characters (due to interpreting UTF-8 as Western).

It is a bother to keep selecting Menu > View > Text Encoding > Unicode to work around this error in Thunderbird.

Any chance of getting this fixed soon? I will respond to all questions quickly, usually within minutes.

Thunderbird 52.8.0 (32-bit), Firefox 60.0.1 (32-bit), Windows 8.1, Asus Laptop

I have carefully gone through all the options of Thunderbird and found only one place where the default character encoding is specified, separately for incoming and outgoing. I have set it to UTF-8, the current standard for the world. However, when mail is rendered in the main viewer, the encoding is set to Western (I can change it manually to UTF-8). Further, "Right-click on subject in mail list "> "Open message in new window" produces a windows that again renders an incoming message as Western. This behavior is clearly wrong, is a bug, and displays incorrect characters (due to interpreting UTF-8 as Western). It is a bother to keep selecting Menu > View > Text Encoding > Unicode to work around this error in Thunderbird. Any chance of getting this fixed soon? I will respond to all questions quickly, usually within minutes. Thunderbird 52.8.0 (32-bit), Firefox 60.0.1 (32-bit), Windows 8.1, Asus Laptop

All Replies (4)

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Right click your folder and check the fallback text encoding under properties. You can also apply the encoding specified there to all messages by checking the checkbox.

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Onno Ekker, Thank you! However, my fallback is already set to UTF-8.

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I have submitted Bug 1465417 .

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What is the encoding in the email? Usually when we see these sort of complaints it is from people getting mail encoded by the sender as Western.

My reading of your bug report is that you think Thunderbird should enforce your choice of encoding over that chosen by the sender. Interesting concept. But non unicode code pages do not map nicely to unicode often.

If you are receiving mail from senders using mail clients that are incorrectly encoding their mail I suggest you advise them their mail is unreadable.