The problem is character encoding.

View menu (alt+V) > text encoding. BAsically email has gone to UNICODE, but there are die hards like apple that continue to pretend that the world is only in English and continue to use 8 bit ISO character sets.

Thunderbird will send mail in UNICODE, hence a single mail can have Mandarin, Cyrillic characters and a little Hebrew. basically all that is needed is a font. The older ISO standard character sets only work for a single language and translate poorly. So in these instances, change the character set in the menu and the odd characters will just disappear. When you reply, make sure to set the text encoding on the options menu.

Note that often changing to western will fix the issue if it is an old mail client sending the mail.

I am not certain if this solved my problem or not. I do know that my friend who sent the e-mail with all those extraneous characters uses Eudora, which is a very old e-mail program -- that may account for some of it. You can't do anything about that, except that I will do a quick Google search to see if I can find anything out about different settings in Eudora.

For myself, I had my outgoing mail set to Unicode but my incoming mail set to Western. I've set both of them to Western now -- I'll see if that makes any difference in the future. But from what you say, it sounds like Thunderbird will send mail in Unicode even if I have the Tools | Options | Display | Formatting | Advanced setting for Outgoing Mail to Western -- is that right?

Oh, and thanks for your quick response, Matt.

Unicode is to be preferred, but whatever you set in options will say set and be the new default. I would leave it on Unicode and tell your friend that their 10 year old copy of Eudora really needs to retire as the mails they send are not really compatible with the modern web. Like Outlook Express really. Both only used ASCII.

Thunderbird 31 is currently the last Thunderbird version with a Eudora import and it is quite likely not to return. The consensus is everyone who will migrate has. So leaving it longer will make it harder for your friend in the long run. Your friend may well be stuck in no mans land with an obsolete mail program full of mail that can be imported nowhere that send mail no one wants to read as it is full of weird characters.

And Thunderbird is currently at version 38.1.0. Upwards compatibility is a bitch.

I'll tell my friend what you said. It's not good news, because I'm not really enough of a techie to easily migrate e-mail, and I'm her main tech support! Possibly whenever she gets a new computer it would be worth doing the migration, because mail will need to be transferred to the new computer anyway.

Thanks for your information, even though it wasn't what I had hoped to hear -- it was helpful anyway.

/the migration is fairly straight forward, Just stat by installing V31. It is available on this FTP server. I have assumed an EN_US version. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/31.8.0/win32/en-US/

Waiting till the new computer is not a good idea. You will have double the mess. Transferring to Thunderbird is bad enough in my opinion. I am suggesting bite sized chunks. Your friend is probably older, and learning the new Thunderbird will occupy some time. Combining that with an upgrade of operating system might just be to much to ask. But I might be to stereotypical in my assumptions.

Unfortunately it's already a big mess, since she has tens of thousands of messages organized into hundreds of Eudora folders. She's hoping to get a new-ish computer with the same operating system soon, though that's not a sure thing. I wouldn't want to make any changes on her current system, because it's already struggling in a lot of ways.

The main virtue of going to Thunderbird when she does get that computer is that I'm very familiar with it and can probably easily support her through the learning-curve problems. It's more geeky than she will like, but a quick Google search tells me that the main alternative is Outlook (or Outlook Express), which has problems of its own -- or possibly something called "Windows Live Desktop", which I know nothing about, but I'd bet it won't run on an older OS anyway.

You said start by installing Thunderbird version 31, but Thunderbird is now at version 38. Are you suggesting she (1) install version 31, (2) transfer the folders of e-mails into it somehow, and then (3) upgrade to version 38?

Also, does the v31 installation program include an option for migrating old e-mail from another program (specifically Eudora)? That would probably be the best way of doing it, if v31's installation does allow for it.

as long as there is sufficient disk space for two copies of her mail. the conversion will, or should, import all mail and put it into the same folders. There may be issues with attachments as Thunderbird does not separate them for storage as Eudora does. But all in all it will be an automatic process. OR a disaster. It sounds like she is not technical, so it will probably be ok. It is the tinkerers that have issues as they have tweaked everything they could find.

Yes I am suggesting do the update with an old version. I know of an individual that uses 1.5 for Eudora. He says it is the best version for importing. But I think that is a bit extreme. The old version will want to update almost immediately, so you have to keep telling it no until you get the import done.

When V31 is installed the first thing it will do is offer to import Eudora. that prevents the user duplicating accounts by adding them to the new install and then importing them. That can have all sorts of strange errors as both try and do the same thing at the same time.

So while your apprehensive, I do not think it will be an issue. The best part is try it. If it does not work you know there will be a big problem in the future and can start preparing. The import changes nothing about Eudora, so it is not as if it does not work something will be broken. Eudora will still do what it does after the event. So in my opinion doing it sooner allows you to prepare if it is bad, and if it is not then then it is just done.