Hello FrankF69,

Would you try this please :

Go to the Configuration Editor (Tools, Options, Advanced, General, Config Editor). Scroll down to mail.strictly_mime Click on it and change it from "false" to true.

That should do the trick ......

That was the fix. THANKS ! Curious, what caused this? Frank

FrankF69 said

That was the fix. THANKS !

My pleasure - I'm glad it worked  !

Curious, what caused this?

In all honesty : I wish I knew ...... It's obviously an encoding problem, which is definately not my field of expertise. 'Been trying to find a proper answer, but all I could find were many threads (even from years back) and articles; none of them came up with an explanation (so sorry .... )

If you are using Thunderbird on something other than windows, find in the top menu "preferences" (On my version preferences is in a drop down under "Thunderbird" ) which should then bring up a small pop up with tabs along the top. Go to the advanced tab and then "General" ! At the bottom of the general tab, you should see "Config Editor" Click that and accept the risk. Scroll down to mail.strictly_mime Click on it to change it from "false" to true.

This replaces the instructions starting with "tools" which on my version of Thunderbird, 60.7.2 , does not exist. Thank you 'McCoy' for this solution! This has been driving me knuts!!

@ xraydavid,

I'm glad it worked for you too !

In my first post I forgot to add this link :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/config-editor

"mail.strictly_mime Click on it and change it from "false" to true."

This corrected the issue of ? marks instead of spaces, until I rebooted. After seeing that I now have a slightly different issue, I checked and mail.strictly_mime is 'Status' Modified 'Type' Boolean 'Value ' True. I made no other changes.

Now I get "�" instead of just a "?"

Hello xraydavid,

As this thread has been marked as solved, and your problem now seems to be different - would you be so kind as to start a new thread and ask a new question  ? You'd stand a way better chance of people looking at it and (hopefully) come up with a proper answer.

When I see this : � all I can think of is that question marks appear because emoji support on the sender's device is not the same as emoji support on the device of the recipient. ...

But I don't think this applies to your situation - I really don't know the answer (so sorry ....)

Hello again xraydavid,

As this appears to be a different problem (and this thread has been marked as solved) : Would you be so kind as to start a new thread and post a question about this issue ? You'd stand a way better chance of someone seeing it (and hopefully come up with a solution).

All I can think of when I see this : � is that question marks appear because emoji support on the sender's device is not the same as emoji support on the device of the recipient. ...

But I don't think that this applies to your situation, and I really don't know what could be causing this in your case (so sorry ....)

xraydavid said

Now I get "�" instead of just a "?"

See these posts for some advice:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/747190

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1115563

xraydavid said

"mail.strictly_mime Click on it and change it from "false" to true." This corrected the issue of ? marks instead of spaces, until I rebooted. After seeing that I now have a slightly different issue, I checked and mail.strictly_mime is 'Status' Modified 'Type' Boolean 'Value ' True. I made no other changes. Now I get "�" instead of just a "?"

As found in another thread, provided 'sfhowes' on this site, this new problem was apparently caused by my "text encoding" changed from Western to Unicode. Any way going to view and text encoding and resetting to western solved that issue! Between the two fixes, Thunderbird is now sending my messages as I type them ; mistakes and all. I am very appreciative of the help this site provided.