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.

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

Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

Why does Thunderbird mangle non-English messages?

  • 2 uphendule
  • 1 inale nkinga
  • 2 views
  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu srvance

more options

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)

more options

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.

more options

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.