I'm Seeing Extened ASCII Characters in my Emails where I'm Expecting Whitespace
When I read emails, I often find extended ASCII characters where I'm expecting to see only whitespace, IE spaces, tabs. This is especially true of texts that I have written that someone has quoted in a reply to my original. But I sometimes see it elsewhere as well.
Not sure as to how to troubleshoot this. I'm running Thunderbird 31.5.0 under Windows 7 64bit. I also saw this problem with an older computer running XP.
Всички отговори (4)
These are character encoding issues, most often seen on my computer with mail that has been through an apple mail client.
Basically the internet now runs mostly on UTF-8 character encoding, unfortunately some vendors just have not mastered UFT and still try and use ASCII character sets.
Press F10 to see the menu, from the view menu select character encoding and check it is UTF-8 toggling with western sometimes helps.
Matt,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question.
If I change the character encoding to "unicode" that will get rid of the extraneous characters, but the fix seems to be local to that viewing of that particular message. If I move to another message then the extraneous characters reappear and when I go to the view menu if find Thunderbird has reverted to "western" encoding.
It would be nice if Thunderbird could be made to use "unicode" encoding globally.
Please let me know if I've misunderstood or overlooked something.
Again, Thank you
Tools|Options|Formatting|Display→Advanced
What's the setting under "Character encoding→Incoming Mail"? If it isn't already "Unicode (UTF-8)", does selecting this help at all?
Променено на от Zenos
Some of those characters are fixed spaces ("nbsp") in UTF-8 (a Unicode encoding) shown in windows-1252 (like Latin1 but with graphics instead of C! controls). If your message is sent in UTF-8 but your correspondent s e-mail client does not know UTF-8, or your message is not marked for it (not likly), and your message has characters outside the ASCII range (the aforesaid nbsp if you space out for alignment), then the answer will contain the UTF-8 encoding but the answer as a whole will not be marked for UTF-8, with the outcome that you show. I ween that your correspondent sees the same garbling, but maybe he is used to it, and no longer cares. For the longest time I used Eudora, which does not support UTF-8, or any Unicode encoding, and I saw such when I got such messages—a minority, but always if the sender uses Cyrillic or Latin2 (say Ő or Ű), and I grew used to it—but if I answered, I always changed such characters to something that fits in Latin1. In short, you got an answer with portions encoded in UTF-8, but was not marked for it, wherefore you have to say Thunderbird nonetheless show it in UTF-8, because the default is Latin1