Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Emails display '�' symbol

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by Dave

more options

Kept getting '�' in my emails so checked & found Text Encoding wasn't set to UTF-8. Set to Unicode (UTF-8) which changed the '�' to '�'. How do I get rid of these symbols?

Kept getting '�' in my emails so checked & found Text Encoding wasn't set to UTF-8. Set to Unicode (UTF-8) which changed the '�' to '�'. How do I get rid of these symbols?

All Replies (4)

more options

Sadly some US ISP's like AT&T and Bellsouth have started *corrupting* their customers' e-mail.

If person sends in windows-1252 and includes for example special punctuation characters or a non-break space xA0, the ISP doesn't correctly interpret the the message as windows-1252 but as UTF-8. In UTF-8, xA0 is not valid and gets replaced by the so-called replacement character, � (0xEF 0xBF 0xBD). If the e-mail is windows-1252 encoded, the recipient's client displays �.

Try this: Menu Icon > Options > Display > 'Formatting' tab click on 'Advanced ' button Set Unicode (UTF-8) on both 'Outgoing' and 'Incoming' Check box "When possible, use the default text encoding in replies" click on all 'OK's


Was the checkbox "when possible, use the default text encoding in replies" selected or did you need to select it ?

Report back on results.

more options

Thanks for the reply.

Nope, still the same.

What I DID find was that after having set both incoming & outgoing to UTF-8 the outgoing had defaulted to Western (ISO-8859.1) somehow. Reset all back to UTF-8, checked the box for 'use default text encoding', rebooted both TB & then laptop with no change - still get the �

Have now noticed that other emails have the same issue with apostrophe's also copping the � treatment.

more options

Try flipping the encoding for individual emails. The gist of the issue is some mails are formatted as one and then encoded by the sending server as the other.

Select the mail, use the appmenu (three bar icon on the toolbar) then > view > text encoding. If is says Unicode change it to western and vise versa.

more options

Matt, That works, sorted! Ta.