The default for what?

You can set the default for new messages, but replies and forwards usually adopt the encoding of the original message.

mjmallory said

This has been asked before. It says it has been solved, but I do not find a solution that works. I'm running Windows 10 and Thunderbird 38.5.0

The default for received messages. Most of my received messages only read correctly when I select character encoding unicode, but i have to manually set it for every message.

So how do you set it for new messages?

Zenos said

The default for what? You can set the default for new messages, but replies and forwards usually adopt the encoding of the original message.

The default for received messages. Most of my received messages only read correctly when I select character encoding unicode, but i have to manually set it for every message.

So how do you set it for new messages?

In principle, an email client, when creating a message, includes a declaration of which encoding it used. The recipient's email client should simply honour this declaration and apply it.

If you're getting messages that Thunderbird decodes improperly, then it's possible that the email client that sent you the messages is at fault. It could either be inserting an incorrect declaration, or omitting it altogether.

Does this problem affect just messages from particular senders? Could you check these messages for the encoding they say they use? Ctrl+u will show you the raw message.

Under Tools|Options|Display|Formatting|Advanced you can set the default encoding, which might be useful if the incoming messages fail to declare the appropriate encoding.

1. that ctrl+u trick is cool and new to me. Good!

2. I have been having the same problem, and tried that on a recent message which said : Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

that looks to me like it should have encoded in unicode, but it didn't. AND, I had already set the "default text encoding" both for sending and receiving to be utf-8.

So, . . .still an issue here I think.

This problem is NOT SOLVED.

I'm watching this thread as well; hoping for a solution.

Tom C

Let me rephrase it folks, and PLEASE give this time a useful answer:

HOW CAN I INSERT LETTERS AND SYMBOLS LIKE ß, ë, Δ, etc IN MY EMAIL TEXT?

That is quite a different question. How did you do it? ;-)

If you compose in HTML, then a useful subset of such characters can be found under Insert|Characters & Symbols.

Or you learn the composition codes. For instance, ° is alt+0176

Or you copy and paste from your GUI's character map.

Or you use an add-on such as Zombie Keys or, my favourite, abcTajpu, which works here in Firefox as well.

ë ç é è œ æ µ ø ß Δ … etc.

or you can, as each other mature application, add Symbol to the Insert pulldown menu...