Windows 10 will reach EOS (end of support) on October 14, 2025. For more information, see this article.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Este fío arquivouse. Faga unha nova pregunta se precisa axuda.

Mangled Content-Transfer-Encoding 8bit

  • 3 respostas
  • 0 have this problem
  • 36 views
  • Last reply by Andy

Andy
Andy
more options

Hello,

Today I added a new mail account and used it to write a test mail containing German umlauts. The result is this:

Subject: Das ist ein Testmail Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Hi,

ich sende dir eine Testmail!

Liebe Grüße

In other accounts that are also configured in Thunderbird but run on other servers, the result looks different. Namely:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Das ist ein Test.

Alles Liebe! =C3=A4=C3=B6=C3=BC =C3=84=C3=96=C3=9C=C3=9F=C3=9F=C3=9F

The latter is correct and right. Why does Thunderbird behave differently for the newly created account?

Kind regards

tamo_bln

Hello, Today I added a new mail account and used it to write a test mail containing German umlauts. The result is this: Subject: Das ist ein Testmail Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Hi, ich sende dir eine Testmail! Liebe Grüße In other accounts that are also configured in Thunderbird but run on other servers, the result looks different. Namely: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Das ist ein Test. Alles Liebe! =C3=A4=C3=B6=C3=BC =C3=84=C3=96=C3=9C=C3=9F=C3=9F=C3=9F The latter is correct and right. Why does Thunderbird behave differently for the newly created account? Kind regards tamo_bln

All Replies (3)

Matt
Matt
  • Top 10 Contributor
  • Moderator
more options

I thought I remembered something from the dim past about yahoo. It was this. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1435903

Is the same outgoing server in use?

Perhaps try the workaround mentioned in the bug. It can not hurt. I sort of recall that some German mail servers will try and enforce windows code pages which is a no no with UTF, but some companies are slow to adapt. So one of the first things is to ensure the server is working how it should. Hence my question of is the SMTP server the same as the ones that are Ok.

Andy
Andy Question owner
more options

HI Matt,

thanks for your reply. It seems it is an issue with Thunderbird for Windows only. I've sent a test message with Thunderbird for Android. This worked as expected. And the answer to your question if the SMTP server is the same as the ones that are ok, the answer is no. It is a different one. I wanted to try to the suggested setting for work-around no. 1, however it is not possible to set this anymore in Thunderbird. I cannot find the menus Display or the Format tab in Thunderbird 128.8.0esr. How do I find these settings now? All I can do is to set "mail.strictly_mime" to true. After I did that mails have now a CTE base64. I wanted it to be quoted-printable. So I'm a bit puzzled because I couldn't find the menu structure mentioned for the work-around. Do you have an idea? I should not forgot to mention that these are postfix 3.8.6 servers which are advertising "8BITMIME" support. These are my own servers.

Andy
Andy Question owner
more options

A little update. I have switched to the latest release of Thunderbird 136.0. I also installed it on a Ubuntu 24.10 desktop and it shows the same behaviour. So this is not about a problem with Windows charsets or so. As mentioned there's a different behaviour with Thunderbird for Android. There the Content-Transfer-Encoding is quoted-printable (7bit) when the email contains German umlauts.