If you see an ë as ë then that means that the wrong encoding is selected.
ë is the ISO representation of the Unicode ë character.
You can see this if you paste data:text/html;charset=utf-8,ë in the location bar and then change the encoding to ISO-8859-1.

Changing the encoding from ISO-8859-1 to Unicode (UTF-8) should be sufficient to fix this unless the ISO representation got copied in Unicode text (i.e. the encoding is already Unicode) and in case of the latter there is usually nothing that can be done apart from editing the message and correct the character manually.

This is what i always did, changing the encoding from ISO-8859-1 to Unicode (UTF-8) to see the right characters. But the next time the settings are changed back again to ISO. So my question is how do I make the settings to UTF permanently so that I don't have to change everytime the encoding?

Font settings in Thunderbird are a little tricky. These settings work for me.

1) main menu bar

  View > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect > set to "Universal"

2) View > Message Body as > set to "plain text"

3) Tools > Options > Display > Formatting > set preferred default fonts and sizes

4) Tools > Options > Display > Formatting > Advanced

a) Western Page

set fonts and sizes as desired

tick "Allow messages to use other fonts"

tick "Use fixed width font for plain text messages"

Outgoing Mail UTF-8

	   Incoming Mail UTF-8

untick "When possible use the default character encoding in replies"

b) On "Fonts For" drop-down menu repeat the procedure for Unicode and Central European.

c) On "Fonts For" drop-down menu select "User Defined" and repeat the procedure.

This will cover most messages, but you may have to repeat this for any other character encodings that cause you problems. For example, messages in ISO 8859-7 will mean you have to change the "Greek" page too. If you don't know which character sets correspond to the Thunderbird pages they're all on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

5) Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor

mailnews.force_charset_override false

6) Folder Properties

Default Character Encoding User Defined

Uncheck 'Apply default to all messages'.

i followed these instructions. I regret to say, it didn't solve the problem.

Then you probably missed a step or did something wrong. Verify again each step.

If that doesn't help, please provide a specific example.

It seems that your answer solved the problem! Thanks for your help!

I have this problem too, but in a much more complex way, and limited to my Draft folders and Templates. I've clearly introduced some corruption [years ago] - because no matter how I encode a particular draft message, Cyrillic gets garbled. Sometimes I can recover the Cyrillic by moving the message temporarily to the Inbox. (This is an over-simplification of the problem, but I'm choosing it for now - maybe I need to start a new thread???)

Right now, because I have stored a LOT of things as either "Drafts" or "Templates", I'm afraid to make any changes, for fear of losing years' worth of work. Among the things I've considered is making a new "temporary" profile with copies of all my messages in it - to experiment with. But that's pretty daunting, without having anyone around who understands this better than I do!

Any way I could get some support on this? Thanks. (I KNOW you need more info, but I think this is enough to get a discussion started. If you'd like me to re-post as a New thread, please let me know.)

- Martha

As this thread has been marked as 'solved' already it would be a good idea to raise a new thread for your problem. Please provide as many details as possible.
Thank you.