Whenever I compose a new email message in Thunderbird, it defaults to the Western (ISO-8859-1) encoding, and I have to manually change it to UTF-8 every time.
How do I change the default?
Thunderbird – How to Change Default Encoding Type for New Emails
encodingthunderbirdutf-8
Related Solutions
Go to
Settings -> Preferences -> New Document/ Open Save Directory
and then in
New Document -> Encoding check UTF8 without BOM
You might also want to tick "Apply to opened ANSI files":
Mail servers shouldn't have any problems at all, since they are not supposed to parse message headers and especially body. The only thing that matters is that the encodings should be supersets of ASCII – which both ISO-8859 and UTF-8 are... Besides, many messages still are 7-bit encoded (either Quoted-Printable or Base64) before sending, just in case it has to travel through a non-8-bit-clean server (even though all mail servers have been 8-bit-clean in the past 10 years).
Mail clients... honestly, I haven't seen any that lack support for UTF-8 for many years. (Perhaps somebody else has?)
Best Answer
In Thunderbird 78+:
Menu > Options > General > Language & Appearance > Advanced button > Text encoding