What character encoding settings do I need so that Thunderbird with Yahoo! stops replacing special characters (such as German umlauts) with "??"
When I send and receive email from Yahoo! online, my special characters (such as German umlauts) are displayed correctly.
In addition, when I send email from Yahoo! online to my Yahoo! account on Thunderbird (52.6.0), the special charcters are displayed correctly.
However, when I send the same email from my Yahoo! account on Thunderbird to my Yahoo! address, the special characters are displayed incorrectly as ??, regardless of whether I open the email online or using Thunderbird.
I therefore conclude that the problem needs to be resolved within Thunderbird, most likely in an "outgoing mail" encoding setting.
My current Thunderbird settings: Tools -> Options -> Display -> Advanced -> Text Encoding outgoing mail = Unicode (UTF-8), Incoming mail = Unicode (UTF-8).
View -> Text encoding -> Unicode
about:config -> mailnews.force_charset_override = default / false
It did not solve the problem to tick or untick "When possible, use the default text encoding in replies"
I do not know how to access "View -> character encoding". It does not solve the problem to change the encoding in "View -> text encoding" when a specific email is open
Chosen solution
I had the same issue with ?? appearing when sent using Yahoo's server, someone on another thread figured out the solution. It has worked for me.
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change your font. Just about everyone I have seen with this complaint is using Arial and it is not a unicode font.
Unfortunately that didn't work.
Under Tools -> Options -> Display, my default font was set to Calibri. I changed it to Lucida Sans Unicode (which is clearly a unicode font), but in the new test mail I sent to myself, the special characters are still displayed as ??
Have a look at the message source in an affected message. I have seen messages re-encoded when passing via certain email servers (ahem, gmail), thereby breaking them.
Note that you may have set the options for display, but that doesn't necessarily set the encoding for message content.
Modified by Zenos
Hi Zenos,
Thanks for your reply. I don't know what to look for in the message source. Here is part of the message source from an email I sent from my yahoo email to the same yahoo email address using Thunderbird. The special characters in that mail were displayed as ??.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Language: en-US Content-Length: 20
Above that there is a lot of complex information under the categories below. Is the information in one of these categories useful in solving the problem?
Return-Path: Received-SPF: X-YMailISG: X-Originating-IP: Authentication-Results: Received: DKIM-Signature: Received: Received: To: From: Subject: Message-ID: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0
p.s. as to the question of whether the problem is related to "passing through different servers", is it possible to rule that out since emails I send from the same yahoo! email address through yahoo webmail are displayed correctly when they are received?
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I had the same issue with ?? appearing when sent using Yahoo's server, someone on another thread figured out the solution. It has worked for me.
Kudos!
I tried it and it seems to be working for me, too.
THANK YOU!