This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

gibberish font when replying or forwarding

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

carltonlaw
carltonlaw
more options

Whenever a message is replied to or forwarded, the recipient gets gibberish characters in the prior messages on that thread. Like this: ��������������� J. These characters appear randomly and makes reading the thread nearly impossible. Thanks for any help! Graham

Whenever a message is replied to or forwarded, the recipient gets gibberish characters in the prior messages on that thread. Like this: ��������������� J. These characters appear randomly and makes reading the thread nearly impossible. Thanks for any help! Graham

All Replies (1)

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
  • Top 25 Contributor
more options

What server are you sending via eg: yahoo, comcast, att

Sadly some US ISP's like AT&T and Bellsouth have started *corrupting* their customers' e-mail.

If the customer sends in windows-1252 and includes for example special punctuation characters or a non-break space xA0, the ISP doesn't correctly interpret the the message as windows-1252 but as UTF-8. In UTF-8, xA0 is not valid and gets replaced by the so-called replacement character, � (0xEF 0xBF 0xBD).

Since the e-mail is still windows-1252 encoded, the recipient's client displays �.

Try this first: Set preference mail.strictly_mime to true.

  • Menu app icon > Options > Options >Advanced > 'General' tab
  • click on 'Config Editor' button - it will say be careful :)
  • in top search type : mime
  • look for this line: mail.strictly_mime
  • If set to false, double click on line to toggle value to true.
  • close window - top x

If still a problem then try: If still using version 68

  • Menu app icon > Options > Options > Display > 'Formatting' tab
  • click on 'Advanced' to see encoding
  • Set 'Unicode' on both Outgoing and Incoming
  • Select Check box "When possible, use the default text encoding in replies"