Why is my email arriving with the text covered by emojis?

Does this still happen when you restart Thunderbird in Troubleshoot Mode? (See <Help | Troubleshoot Mode>.) If not, this could implicate a misbehaving add-on.

I've never seen this symptom before so I don't have a guaranteed solution, but the first thing I'd do would be to check my font settings at <Settings | Composition | HTML Style> and reset them to the default settings. I believe that if you specify a font that the recipient doesn't have, their system may try to substitute something else, with unpredictable results.

Another thing to check would be if you have any language packs installed. They can be found at <Tools | Add-Ons & Themes>. I doubt this is part of the problem, though.

Does this still happen when you restart Thunderbird in Troubleshoot Mode? (See <Help | Troubleshoot Mode>.) If not, this could implicate a misbehaving add-on. I've never seen this symptom before so I don't have a guaranteed solution, but the first thing I'd do would be to check my font settings at <Settings | Composition | HTML Style> and reset them to the default settings. I believe that if you specify a font that the recipient doesn't have, their system may try to substitute something else, with unpredictable results. Another thing to check would be if you have any language packs installed. They can be found at <Tools | Add-Ons & Themes>. I doubt this is part of the problem, though.

Thanks for replying, Lin. This is an issue reported to me of recipients of a couple of my emails -- not something I am experiencing -- they are (coincidentally?) both GMail users. My language is set to English and the default font is Calibri . . . I suppose it could be that they don't have Calibri, but the weird thing is that they have gotten emails from me just fine before. In this case, the first few words of the message are not covered and the other ones are kinda visible behind the emojis, if the image is enlarged. The emojis covering the text were copied in from Messenger and are appearing over the text after the insertion point. Sue

I think your default font choice may be the problem. When you compose a message and specify your local font, and the recipient doesn't have that particular font installed, their system will have to substitute another one, with possibly unpredictable results. That may be what's going on here. It's safest to stick with the generic "Variable Width" and "Fixed Width", which gives the receiving system the chance to use their default fonts of that type. Next safest would be "Helvetica, Arial" (variable, sans-serif), "Times" (variable, serif), or "Courier" (fixed, serif). Most or all systems have these fonts or know how to substitute a very similar one.

So, try changing the Composition font to something more generic and see if that looks better to them. Also, if you copy&paste text from other sources, like web pages or formatted documents, be prepared for the recipient to see something other than the original. One way to avoid the problem is to, when you're pasting the text, right-click and use the "Paste Without Formatting" option.

Thanks for replying, Lin! And thanks for offering the "Paste Without Formatting" option and suggesting that I switch my default font. But, again I ask, wouldn't I have this problem with more people if the issue was my font choice? It does, however, seem to have something to do with my having copied the emojis from Messenger into an email (which is also something I do all the time because Thunderbird doesn't have very many emojis) and the recipients being Gmail users. Also, the text that was covered with emojis in the original instance appears in the browser version as highlighted red, so there may be something to what you say about pasting without formatting. I will keep this in mind going forward.

As a little side note, there seemed to be a larger issue, as I had thought Thunderbird was no longer downloading my emails to me from the server (was it some sort of corruption from the emoji thing, I wondered) -- I'd click 'Get Messages' and it kept saying there are none to download -- but I could see there were some there when I connected to my provider via a browser. Turns out, Tbird had STARTED SENDING ALL OF MY EMAILS TO SPAM. I discovered this today when verifying whether I was able to send email from within and outside of Tbird and see it in the browser . . . I just happened to see that they flashed in my Inbox and then disappeared, and somehow it caused me to think about checking Spam (which, btw, had not been working in TBird for about two years and now all of a sudden has apparently just started again, unbeknownst to me, after having tried recently to troubleshoot it). For whatever reason, my training.dat file for Spam was dated just before this issue started occurring. And I see that Tbird Version 158.0 | Released October 13, 2026, which is the day before the Spam issue occurred. Now, from what I've learned, looks like I have to retrain Tbird that all of my emails aren't SPAM!! Oh well, easy enough and at least now I have my emails coming in AND spam filtering working :)

But the emails to Spam issue started after the emojis thing started so, after half a day lost figuring out what happened to my emails, I will now go back to the original issue and continue to gather any more info I can to report back. Thanks again for your help!!