re :one email account auto empties the trash folder, but the other account does not

Possible reasons: If one account is an imap mail account, then there may be a server policy to periodically empty the trash.

Has one account got a setting to Empty Trash on exit? Tools > Account Settings or Menu icon > Options > Account Settings

Select: 'Server Settings' for the account Bottom right - 'Empty Deleted/Trash folder on 'Exit' If selected then this would explain the Trash being emptied.

Thanks for the reply I have 2 email addresses. One never shows the trash. I can delete an email from the inbox and then check trash and there will be nothing there. Both are pop3. Neither are checked to empty trash on exit. This started when I upgraded to 38.5.1 as well as the strange font characters. Nothing was changed in my settings by me. When I go to the folder properties for the trash folder and look in General Information, it shows I have 11638 messages. I can't see them however.

Here is something I just discovered. If I right click the trash folder and search messages. I can put in a word and those messages containing that word show up. I can open a message, but yet, I cannot see anything in the trash folder & and still show the weird font characters in my inbox messages.

Go to the Trash folder and select View-Threads and make sure All is selected. Sounds like you have it set to Unread.

That was it. Thanks much. Not certain why it changed after the upgrade. Any idea on the second concern that occurred after this upgrade - the strange fonts. Sample of strange text. This should be the word we'll - We’ll .

I have not seen that one but it might be a Text Encoding problem. Go to View-Text Encoding and see what you have. I have Unicode.

That's a character set/encoding issue and I don't understand why this happens. A message will (should) include a declaration of the encoding being used and so Thunderbird should just use the appropriate encoding.

Usually if you go to View|Text Encoding and try the other settings shown there, one of them will cause the message to be shown correctly. The puzzle is to why Thunderbird chooses the wrong one.

Your example is typical of a Unicode-encoded message being treated as an ISO or Windows character set, e.g. "Latin" or "Western".

Thanks for the replies. Mine shows Western. I believe I have tried changing it, but will try again.

I can change it to unicode, but if I go out of it and come back and check again, it is switched to Western. Sometimes it stays at unicode one time, but if I go back and check again, it is back to western.

Do you have a message showing this effect that you could share with me? If so, please send it as an attachment to

xenos at gmx dot co dot uk

Your experience of being able to temporarily fix it is not unusual. But I have not yet seen a message that actually declared an incorrect encoding.

I sent you the attachment. To be certain, I don't get a message telling me it is incorrect encoding. The email message I receive back from them has the strange characters.

Well, your message shows only utf-8 as the encoding, and so Thunderbird here is correctly interpreting this as Unicode. I don't understand why yours would be imposing "Western" on it when the message quite clearly tells it to do otherwise.

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

html part: Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

(I need to review what the "quoted-printable" means. ISTR discussions about unsuitable entries here leading to messages becoming corrupted.)

The places where the error happens all seem to be in other people's replies to you, so it would seem likely that your correspondents' clients are doing the damage. But you indicate this has only started happening after a recent update of your own system.

Go to Tools|Options|Display|Formatting click the "Advanced" button (not the "advanced" tab!)

What entries do you have down at the bottom, under "Text Encoding"?

(Even if it says "Western" here, I don't understand why Thunderbird would ignore the UTF-8 declaration in the message itself.)

I would recommend that you clear the checkbox "When possible, use the default text encoding in replies".

I think at this point the message is internally damaged; no tweaking of encoding, now, can undo past damage.

Outgoing Mail Unicode (UTF-8) Incoming Mail (ISO-8859-1) Should I change anything here? "When possible, use the default text encoding in replies". Was already unchecked