Member Avatar for mdrobbins

In messages received in Thunderbird I am starting to get strange symbols, such as shown below.

******************
me…Â
The Geezers’ Crusade
*****************
Has anyone else seen this problem? Is it Thunderbird or my machine (iMac OS x10.6)?

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Dani AI

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This is a classic charset mismatch (often called "mojibake"): the bytes that make up non‑ASCII text were encoded using one charset but are being decoded with a different one. was on the right track; since has already looked at client encoding defaults, the most useful next step is to inspect the raw message headers to see what charset the sender declared.

How to confirm and a quick repair:

  • Open the raw message (Message Source) and look for the MIME headers, especially any Content-Type line that includes a charset parameter and any encoded‑word header tokens of the form =?...?...?=.
  • If the header either has the wrong charset or no charset at all, force the message viewer to decode using Unicode (UTF‑8) for that message — the display will usually correct itself immediately.
  • If the header claims UTF‑8 but the text is still garbled, the message may have been double‑encoded by the sender (their program encoded text as UTF‑8 but the outgoing headers say a single‑byte charset).

Longer‑term fixes:

  • Configure clients to send messages as UTF‑8 and to use quoted‑printable or base64 for non‑ASCII bodies.
  • Ask frequent senders to ensure their mailers set proper MIME headers and use RFC‑2047 encoding for non‑ASCII headers.
  • Upgrade to a current mail client; modern clients handle charset negotiation and malformed headers more robustly.

Background/reference: see RFC 2047 on encoded header words and general discussion of mojibake for how these mismatches arise (RFC 2047, Mojibake — Wikipedia).

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Member Avatar for Salem

Do you have a menu option for "Character Encoding"?
Because it looks like UTF-8 encoded UNICODE to me.

Member Avatar for mdrobbins

Many thanks for your fast reply. I am still using Thunderbird 2.0.0.23.

Both incoming and outgoing mail default character encoding are set for "Western (ISO - 8859-1)."

In addition to the above, other choices for Western character encoding are:
IBM -850
8859-15
MacRoman
Windows-1252

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