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Why does Thunderbird mangle non-English messages?

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by srvance

srvance
srvance
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When I receive messages with non-Western characters, Thunderbird displays them badly. Sometimes, they display properly when I change the character encoding to Unicode. Sometimes they are just mangled beyond recovery. Even when I get them to display properly, they don't print properly. In particular, I've had this problem with both Korean and Chinese. In some cases, if I hadn't read them on my iPhone first, I would never have been able to get someone to translate them and the content would have been completely lost.

When I receive messages with non-Western characters, Thunderbird displays them badly. Sometimes, they display properly when I change the character encoding to Unicode. Sometimes they are just mangled beyond recovery. Even when I get them to display properly, they don't print properly. In particular, I've had this problem with both Korean and Chinese. In some cases, if I hadn't read them on my iPhone first, I would never have been able to get someone to translate them and the content would have been completely lost.

All Replies (2)

Matt
Matt
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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I know for Chinese there is an issue that the old simplified Chinese character set which is not obsolete is not mapping to the correct Unicode character set. I would assume that the same is probably happening with Korean.

srvance
srvance Question owner
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Other mail readers, such as a web-based reader I use sometime, iOS and Mac Mail, and Outlook, have never given me problems of this sort. I have actually lost information because of the mangling at times.