Is this happening with all emails or specific ones?

all emails I send - But if I dont capitalize any letters , dont get the icons. all incoming emails have icons in place of capital letters I have in the last few days played with setting for fonts and others I cant recall. now the problem is gone. this problem appeared a few months back when I changed the fonts settings. played with the setting without luck. then the problem disappeared for a while then appeared a few weeks ago. and now gone again , but for how long?

Try this: - click settings>general and scroll down to config editor (near the bottom on right) - click that and enter mail.strictly_mime if set to FALSE, toggle to set to TRUE save and exit. I believe this will ensure consistent email characters. (I encourage starting config editor a second time to verify that the change happened. It's easy to toggle and accidentally not save the change.)

David thanks for offering a possible solution. in my previous reply , the problem seems to have disappeared just as mysteriously as it appeared, just by changing settings for fonts and message formats. I checked my config setting you reference and it was and still is False.

I will save your solution in case the problem reappears. thanks again george