Why does this symbol ’ show up in my email messages almost always?
does not occur in all incoming emails but makes it difficult to read. Sample follows:
Whew! It’s been 3 hours, you’ve been tinkering in Photoshop all afternoon, but you finally got it:
… The Perfect Mask.
It might be the wings of a soaring eagle, your best friend's wedding veil, or a model’s curly hair — it’s the part of your photo that has real soul in it, the part you desperately want to keep.
Soluzione scelta
I have had the same problem with the  character inserted into emails that I have received from some others, and almost always those I have received from myself. I am on WinXP SP3 with whatever are the final updates available there, I am running Tbird 31.1.1 . Mozilla seems to have made changes to how it handles ( or now, mishandles) font displays. I have made no changes to my system's display settings until trying to correct this rather recent problem. Again, I have never seem these odd characters ( and others) until recently, and they come from within my own system.
My Tools>Options>Display>Formatting>Advanced>CharacterEncodings settings were originally: Outgoing Mail: Unicode (UTF-8) Incoming Mail: Western (ISO 8859-1)
Per the suggestion above, changed both to Unicode (UTF-8). That did not solve the problem.
Then I changed so both are Western (ISO 8859-1). That seems to have solved the symptoms.
However, I do not think it has solved the problem. Mozilla has evidently made a change to their systems which affects the display of fonts, even those sent from my system to itself when I have made no changes to my configuration during that time! Pointing to other software vendors' non-standardization is, at best, an incomplete explanation for this issue. This is a recent issue that has cropped up during Mozilla's apparent frantic efforts to get those version numbers to triple digits before 2016 for no clear and valuable reason.
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It is a character encoding issue. Whom ever is sending the mail is using a character set that is not appropriate.
View menu (Alt+V) > character encoding and select UTF-8 or unicode should see the correct display.
Soluzione scelta
I have had the same problem with the  character inserted into emails that I have received from some others, and almost always those I have received from myself. I am on WinXP SP3 with whatever are the final updates available there, I am running Tbird 31.1.1 . Mozilla seems to have made changes to how it handles ( or now, mishandles) font displays. I have made no changes to my system's display settings until trying to correct this rather recent problem. Again, I have never seem these odd characters ( and others) until recently, and they come from within my own system.
My Tools>Options>Display>Formatting>Advanced>CharacterEncodings settings were originally: Outgoing Mail: Unicode (UTF-8) Incoming Mail: Western (ISO 8859-1)
Per the suggestion above, changed both to Unicode (UTF-8). That did not solve the problem.
Then I changed so both are Western (ISO 8859-1). That seems to have solved the symptoms.
However, I do not think it has solved the problem. Mozilla has evidently made a change to their systems which affects the display of fonts, even those sent from my system to itself when I have made no changes to my configuration during that time! Pointing to other software vendors' non-standardization is, at best, an incomplete explanation for this issue. This is a recent issue that has cropped up during Mozilla's apparent frantic efforts to get those version numbers to triple digits before 2016 for no clear and valuable reason.