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UTF-8 (accented) characters are displayed wrong

  • 2 replies
  • 14 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by djcm

djcm
djcm
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Thunderbird often displays UTF-8 characters wrong -- accented letters, euro symbol, bullets, etc. It happens in both plain text and HTML, so perhaps it's a problem in interpreting and displaying MIME-encoded UTF-8 characters, and not a problem of composition. (But I'm not certain.)

I first noticed this in messages from others, but I recently saw it with a message I sent and CCed to myself. As an example I composed a message containing "Zürich" and CCed myself. When I read the message, "Zürich" appears as "Zürich". The relevant lines of the source as both sent and seen are 

   MIME-Version: 1.0
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
   Content-Language: en-US
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

   [...] Z=C3=BCrich [...]

This means that Thunderbird is displaying wrongly even some messages that it composed itself.

What's the solution?

Thunderbird often displays UTF-8 characters wrong -- accented letters, euro symbol, bullets, etc. It happens in both plain text and HTML, so perhaps it's a problem in interpreting and displaying MIME-encoded UTF-8 characters, and not a problem of composition. (But I'm not certain.) I first noticed this in messages from others, but I recently saw it with a message I sent and CCed to myself. As an example I composed a message containing "Zürich" and CCed myself. When I read the message, "Zürich" appears as "Zürich". The relevant lines of the source as both sent and seen are MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable [...] Z=C3=BCrich [...] This means that Thunderbird is displaying wrongly even some messages that it composed itself. What's the solution?

All Replies (2)

Zenos
Zenos
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I have seen issues like this when saving messages as Drafts, and it is not uncommon to encounter web pages where similar things go wrong; often you can view the page as intended in an alternative browser.

I tried to reproduce your issue. No dice; the accented characters came back perfectly, both in the body text and in the subject line. It is interesting that the entire subject line was encoded, rather than the piecemeal-as-necessary approach you often see.

I noted that the Source View window doesn't seem to know about UTF-8; the message content was shown there as:

Zŭrich Français été

whereas the subject line showed as

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?WsWtcmljaCBGcmFuw6dhaXMgw6l0w6k=?=

This may not be important in the context of what your Thunderbird is doing wrong, but does make me suspicious of what I see in the source view.

The initial encoding info looks the same as yours: 

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Language: en-GB

but we are different here: 

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

How do you compose your accented characters? Are you using a keyboard/OS combination that inherently supports these? I have a regular en-gb OS and keyboard (which has no built-in accents) and I use the abcTajpu addon to insert the more exotic characters in Thunderbird and Firefox. Actually, in this case, I composed the message body and copied the words to the subject line. I could have used abcTajpu directly, but I note that we are not invited to use Thunderbird's Insert|Characters and Symbols menu item to add accented characters to the subject line.

So, I surmise that thunderbird is capable of doing this right, but between us we have some differences that mess yours up.

What platform, OS and Thunderbird versions are you using?

Modified by Zenos

djcm
djcm Question owner
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Thanks, Zenos.

Windows 7 (64-bit) and Thunderbird 52.2.1 (32-bit), but earlier releases of Thunderbird have exhibited the same problem.

But the behavior is inconsistent. I just tried sending the single character "ü" in both the Subject and the body, entered three different ways: 

   Windows ALT-0252
   abctajpu
   paste from BabelMap

and it worked for all of them. This time. The header lines were the same as for my original example. What setting would lead Thunderbird to give me 

   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Could 

   https://superuser.com/questions/766269/how-to-change-content-transfer-encoding-for-email-attachments

be relevant? Or 

   https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1006626