Question about character encoding and old email

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Thunderbird
Post Reply
tomdkat
Posts: 1410
Joined: October 14th, 2003, 7:53 am

Question about character encoding and old email

Post by tomdkat »

Hi! After importing a ton of email from Outlook Express into Thunderbird, my friend noticed something odd when replying to one of the old Outlook Express imported messages. He's running Thunderbird 38.5.0 on Windows XP and the character encoding settings are the default Thunderbird settings. Outgoing mail is encoded as UTF-8 and incoming mail is encoded as Western (ISO-8859-1). Messages he reads are displayed with "Western" encoding. Cool.

When replying to a message originally received by Outlook Express, his sent message contains strange characters in it. Here's an example:

Code: Select all

Hello again.� Weather looks great.� I am looking forward to going outside.
Looking at the message to which he responded, I found the message is encoded as Windows-1252.

My question: is there any way for him to respond to his old Outlook Express e-mail, which is encoded as Windows-1252, such that the strange symbols don't appear, as shown above?

Thanks in advance!
User avatar
tanstaafl
Moderator
Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Question about character encoding and old email

Post by tanstaafl »

Windows 1252 is a superset of Western. Try changing the incoming mail character set to UTF-8 too. Hopefully that will solve the display problem. UTF-8 is a version of Unicode designed for backwards compatibility - the first 128 characters correspond one to one with ASCII.
Post Reply