Some Emails have extra symbols in the text.
I have been getting these "Â" symbols in the text of some emails for about a week now, I have set my Text Encoding to Unicode 9 (utf-8) on both incoming & outgoing, originally both set on Western (Windows-1252), I was told my emails had lots of strange symbols in them, so changed outgoing to Unicode (problem solved), then noticed incoming had the problem (only on some emails), changed outgoing to Unicode which lessened the amount of symbols but now left with the "Â" symbol appearing usually just before the £ sign. Just noticed I now have these also "…" appearing at the end of some lines. I have recently (new year) changed to 78.7.0 (64-bit) was on 32-bit, never had problem before that. should I go back to 32-bit or have I got a setting wrong? Thanks Dave
Chosen solution
Thanks for the reply's, whilst sitting here I checked through some of the old emails in the deleted folder, if I sent them back to the Inbox, they had the symbols, in the deleted folder no symbols, checked the properties of the Inbox and saw that it had a Fallback Text Encoding, which was set too Western (Windows-1252), changed it to Unicode, all works fine now! This may help someone else with this problem, I never knew you could change the Text Encoding on the Inbox folder?
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Are the messages with the extra symbols sent by a TB user on a yahoo/aol/rogers/sky account? Ctrl+U to view the message source and possibly see the email client (User-Agent).
No, they are from Ebay, sky, transport for London, etc, I have noticed now, that when the emails are deleted, in the deleted folder they don't have the extra symbols.
Even in the automated email I just received for this, on the bottom I got "This email is automatically sent by a robot. Our robot can’t respond to your question, but", so it seems I get the extra symbols from everyone?
Hello there DKT1 We have read your message. We try to help you.
If they use a automatic email sending robot.
To send e-mails, the Standalone E-mail Robot requires either an SMTP server that it can use for relaying outbound messages, or you can enable the internal SMTP relay function and permit the Standalone E-mail Robot to make outbound connections through your firewall to deliver the messages. The Standalone E-mail Robot does not and cannot use MAPI for mail delivery, it only uses SMTP.
The strange message sign could be from passing your system.
Probably so they don’t get filtered out for phrases as easily as spam.
Most programs designed for the 32-bit version of Windows will run on the 64-bit version of Windows. Notable exceptions are many antivirus programs. However, if the program is specifically designed for the 64-bit version of Windows, it will not work on the 32-bit version of Windows.
Greetings Firefox volunteer
Modified
You just have to google ’ to find this is a common problem, with plenty of suggestions, if not solutions. I don't know if it matters if TB is 32 or 64-bit, but I use 32-bit and don't see that in the same automated forum replies that you get.
Chosen Solution
Thanks for the reply's, whilst sitting here I checked through some of the old emails in the deleted folder, if I sent them back to the Inbox, they had the symbols, in the deleted folder no symbols, checked the properties of the Inbox and saw that it had a Fallback Text Encoding, which was set too Western (Windows-1252), changed it to Unicode, all works fine now! This may help someone else with this problem, I never knew you could change the Text Encoding on the Inbox folder?
Hello there again DkT1. Oke that s correct.
Cause:
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German.
It is the most-used single-byte character encoding in the world. As of January 2021, 0.3% of all web sites declared use of Windows-1252,[2][3] but at the same time 1.6%[2] used ISO 8859-1 (while only 0.9% of top-1000 websites[4]), which by HTML5 standards should be considered the same encoding,[5] so that 1.9% of web sites effectively use Windows-1252. Pages declared as US-ASCII would also count as this character set. An unknown (but probably large) subset of other pages only use the ASCII portion of UTF-8, or only the codes matching Windows-1252 from their declared character set, and could also be counted.
Depending on the country, use can be much higher than the global average, e.g. for Germany (including ISO-8859-1) at 7.2%.
Greetings Firefox volunteer.
Modified
I'm getting a related problem - which didn't happen in Outlook which I used before. If I send an email with the £ symbol, everyone receives it as � - googling that says it's what comes up in Thunderbird for a double space. But I didn't use a double space; I send the £ symbol; it looks fine when sent, but not when received - not even if I send to myself. Everything is set to UTF-8.
Any way around this ?
fuzzbucket said
I'm getting a related problem - which didn't happen in Outlook which I used before. If I send an email with the £ symbol, everyone receives it as � - googling that says it's what comes up in Thunderbird for a double space. But I didn't use a double space; I send the £ symbol; it looks fine when sent, but not when received - not even if I send to myself. Everything is set to UTF-8. Any way around this ?
From above: "Are the messages with the extra symbols sent by [you] on a yahoo/aol/rogers/sky account?"
Sent by me, within Thunderbird, yes on a yahoo account.
The symbols aren't extra as such, they replace the £.
If you're sending through a Yahoo (ATT, Rogers, Verizon etc.) type server and your recipients see unwanted characters, set mail.strictly_mime to true in Options/General/Indexing/Config. editor to enforce Quoted Printable encoding (Outlook default).
Thanks; that was a bit scary. Now I will just wait for a recipient to respond !
And thank you for that - it worked.