heres the screenshot

I cannot upload the email that causes it

Fairly common complaint from folk using certain Linux distributions. Ubuntu particularly.

I suggest you update to V60. Here getthunderbird.com or from your repository.

founbd a solution here. apparantly some symbolic font.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1030609/ubuntu-18-04-fresh-installation-thunderbird-inbox-invaded-by-large-icons-col

this fixed it: sudo apt-get install fonts-symbola

Yeah, updating to Thunderbird 60 fixes it without any other mucking around. but fixing the font is the workaround.

Matt said

Yeah, updating to Thunderbird 60 fixes it without any other mucking around. but fixing the font is the workaround.

However, I have not a good feeling to install the latest version by hand in ubuntu 18. I installed thunderbird using apt and apparently ubuntu sees thunderbird 52.9.1 as production. I am not very fond of overriding the default ubuntu production settings, because that can break other stuff. see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-thunderbird-linux