The character encoding in the email obviously specifies Western.

While The setting you are changing is and option, and right clicking the folder that has the email in it and in properties updating the default encoding is also a valid option. The underlying issue is those Sending the mail are specifying an old windows ANSI font or encoding so the mail ends up in the Western format. Sometime it is caused by copy and paste from excel, that venerable program still has all sorts of trouble with Unicode, so it converts everything to ANSI, even offering to "import" Unicode documents. Folk keep paying for it, so Microsoft see no issue in not updating it to the font standard they adopted with Windows XP

So far I have seen some German companies that appear to think it is still the 1980s. then there are the Americans who have not managed to conversion to Unicode because US English does not need it. So why change what is not broken. Then there are the Luddites that still use ancient mail programs like outlook express, Eudora et al that simply, in some cases, can only use ANSI character encodings and email is a veritable dogs breakfast of rubbish. Usually sent by people we refuse to accept that they are doing anything to annoy others.

It is for these reasons that there is no a one size fits all "fix" for the rubbish folk are sending out as "email".

Thank you Matt. I'm confused. If the "setting" for incoming messages merely shows what the current message is, why is there a method to change it?

My recent problem case was when I forwarded an old message to someone. My hypothesis is that if such a message is an "old" or "bad" font, if I forward it to someone it will "pollute" my new message, so that even the new text I top at the top will be affected. Is there any validity to this suspicion? And, if so, is there a way to overcome this? When I look at these old messages in Thunderbird they look fine, and they print okay.

Hello, it's me again

I just did an experiment. No message was open and I looked at the "incoming" setting. It was Western. I changed it to UTF-8. It did NOT persist. Then I shut TB down and restarted it. It showed Western, but this time when I changed it to UTF-8 it persisted. So, a couple of questions/observations:

   (1)  If setting this is telling TB which code to use for incoming messages, it makes sense that it can be changed from the main screen (not in a message, in other words), but why does TB allow you to change it when you are in a message, if it's going to revert to what it thinks the message already is?

    (2)  It appears that TB can get fixated so that it doesn't allow you to change the general setting (the one that's not seen when you're in a message), a condition which can only be fixed by bouncing TB.  

Should there be a fix for both problems? One, don't allow changes that TB isn't going to pay attention to (which only confuse the user), and two, don't change the overall default for no apparent reason where the only solution is to shutdown and restart TB.

I think the setting for the outgoing encoding is there to select what encoding Thunderbird will use when you compose a new message. When you forward inline, or reply to a received message, it will continue to use the encoding of the original incoming message.

I can only assume that the selection for encoding in relation to incoming messages is to provide a default encoding in cases where the message lacks a meaningful declaration of encoding.

So, for replies, forwards and the majority of received messages, the encoding settings are irrelevant, and that may be why they appear to you to do nothing.

Thank you Zenos. What you say makes sense, but I wonder why the programming allows changes to the incoming setting when you're looking at the settings from within a particular message. I can see allowing a change to a default, but when you're viewing a message, allowing the change can be confusing. Why not make the field unchangeable if Thunderbird has decided what it is and is going to ignore any attempt to change it?

Is there nothing that can be done to solve this? I don't recall the problem always existing. People wonder why some of my messages are so hard to read. Even if I remember not to type two adjacent spaces after a sentence, when you forward something you can't be expected to undo the extra spaces in the message that you're forwarding. I know we can decry other programs which haven't adopted the latest standards, but such posturing doesn't eliminate the problem, which is that junky emails are produced by Thunderbird.

Also, I'm fairly certain that the default for outgoing mail was changed after I set it to UTF-8. Are we certain that there are no circumstances where it might be changed by itself?

Sometimes the encoding declared in a message is wrong. In that case, you can override it to see if you can hit on the correct encoding scheme and render the message correctly.

I think this can happen when, in composing a message, text from another application is pasted in. I see it on webpagrs too.

I don't want to be argumentative, but in my experience when you change the code for the incoming setting, it just changes it back. It lets you make the change on the screen, but if you exit the screen and come back into it while in the same message, it's reverted to what it showed before. So the idea that it allows us to override the determination it made doesn't seem valid.

Also, there's no real way to tell whether the message you're forwarding has a problem. You don't see the garbage before you send it. Allowing us to force it to always be UTF-8 might be a solution, might it not?

Is there no one who recognizes that this is a problem and that a solution should be found?