You get those characters because the person is sending mails with special characters without specifying the right encoding. If you want to be able to read all the characters, you have to go to the menu View -> Character Encoding and try to find/guess the encoding he uses. Hopefully this doesn't mess up the display of other messages you receive, otherwise you have to change the encoding for each message:-(

Thanks for you help, but I've tried thath. And still, this solutions not helping.. :((

I noticed a black arrow in one of my mails myself and I had to set the character encoding to Western, even though Western was already checked. I suppose this is because of the setting under the menu Tools -> Options -> Display -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced -> Character Encodings where I have Unicode (UTF-8) selected for incoming mail.

I have tried in many ways, but unfortunately nothing happens... From same person I am getting letters, but each time it is different. One letter it is possible to read, another one I am getting "Black Question Mark"...

Maybe it is of Russian language, that's why I am getting... but tried different encoding... nothing...

You might ask the sender what font they are using. If they specify a font you do not have installed the computer will try and find a best match. Usually that is just ugly, but sometime the characters are actually completely different.. � is a replacement specified in unicode for characters that can not be rendered using the character set and font.

As you appear to have eliminated the character set, the next logical point is the font.

Sender was using "Vorgabe Sans Serif" as a standard font, but changed to a "Arial" and send me a letter back - and nothing happened, still same..

Also look up for "View" -> "Mesage Soure" : Content-Type: text/html; charset="ISO-2022-KR"

Does it give any idea?

Also when a sender changed into "Times new roman" when the letter came in good way, was able to read. When we tried to test it once again, it again became "Black question"...

Maybe I have set something wrong in a Thunderbird? for fonts? or something like that?

Where I can check how to set properly fonts?

Thanks for help!

I'm seeing these too (always have, in web pages too, life's too short…) but I also see them in email header info such as sender addresses.

For example:

From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Xx=EBx_Xxxxxx?= <xxx@xxx.com> From: =?Windows-1252?Q?Xx=EBx_Xxxxxx?= <xxx@xxx.com>

It's trying to show an ë but displays as the � symbol. I'm using Segoe UI for my desktop, menus etc. The message was originated by an MS Office (Outlook) user.

Now this is in headers and so independent of how we set up for message content.

Why isn't Thunderbird handling these right? And it it fails here, could the same failure occur inside message body text?

Those headers show up correct for me, whether I'm using Calibri or Segou UI, so I guess something's wrong with your setup as well. The character encoding is also specified in the header itself, so I don't think it's a Thunderbird setting.

The message body is displayed in a different way, but if this error is happening both in the headers and in the message body, it's more of a reason to think Window's (or whatever OS you are using) is doing something wrong. Unfortunately I don;t know how I can help you with that...

And it also happens on my LInux machine. Kinda points to the common factor being Thunderbird.

Does link even have the ?Windows-1252? code page?

While googleing I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 which perhaps sheds some light as it talks of the common error of parsing Windows-1252 text as ISO-8859-1 when the standard actually calls for the reverse. Does setting the charset to Western ISO-8859-1 help with the display? and what charset is Thunderbird self selecting... I am guessing UTF-8.

This may be a side effect of Bug 158285