Arabic in the archived emails showing as special characters
Dear Support,
I have recently moved some users from outlook to thunderbird, and uninstalled MS office from their computers, as I have arabic users, some of the old emails which are in Arabic are displaying as special characters.
The strange thing is other emails ( which are also in arabic) are fine, I tried changing character encoding and even changed encoding from "Menu location:Edit | Folder Properties | General Information", but nothing is working, I have attached a screenshot of an email. any help would be highly appreciated.
All Replies (8)
Font settings in Thunderbird are a little tricky. These settings work for me.
1) main menu bar
View > Character Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8)
2) View > Message Body as: set to 'plain text'
3) main menu bar Tools (Alt-T) - Options - Display - Formatting: set preferred default fonts and sizes
4) main menu bar Tools (Alt-T) - Options - Display - Formatting - Fonts & Colors - Advanced: a) On 'Fonts for' drop-down menu choose 'Unicode': set fonts and sizes as desired
tick "Allow messages to use other fonts" tick "Use fixed width font for plain text messages" Outgoing Mail UTF-8 Incoming Mail UTF-8
untick "When possible use the default character encoding in replies"
b) On "Fonts for" drop-down menu repeat the procedure for 'Arabic (ISO)' and Arabic (Windows)
c) On "Fonts for" drop-down menu select "User Defined" and repeat the procedure.
This will cover most messages, but you may have to repeat this for any other character encodings that cause you problems. For example, messages in ISO 8859-7 will mean you have to change the "Greek" page too. If you don't know which character sets correspond to the Thunderbird pages they're all on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
5) Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor
set the pref 'mailnews.force_charset_override' to 'false'
6) Folder Properties
Default Character Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8) Uncheck 'Apply default to all messages'.
Modified by christ1
Hi christ,
i reaaly appreciate your effort, I followed your solution but it didn't work for me.
Then you probably missed a step or did something wrong. Not sure what else to say.
I have tried it again, still no success but noticed few different options
4 b) I cannot find 'Arabic (ISO)' and Arabic (Windows) options from drop down list but i can see only"arabic", and did the same procedure for it.
6. i don't see "default character encoding" what i can see is "Fallback character encoding" and i set it to "Unicode (UTF-8)"
I am using latest version 31.4.0
That's fine.
Can you look in the message source what character encoding is used? Open the message and press ctrl-u.
you mean the following information
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
050507010503010001050805
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
If this is a HTML message try View - Message Body As - Original HTML
Nope :( didn't work, until now it was only mails in archive folders but now even some new emails are also displaying special characters.
if you provide me your email id, i can forward you one of these emails for you to test, is that ok with you?
Sorry for bothering you.