Thunderbird 38 displaying garbage characters in Inbox Subject line for certain e-mails

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Starting (I believe) with Thunderbird 38.0.1, all Gmail e-mails that I receive from UPS about upcoming and completed deliveries have three or four domino-like icons at the end of the Subject line in the Inbox. This is also happening to e-mails received from UPS in the past. The Thunderbird message display does not show the extra characters in the Subject – they only appear in the Inbox. They also do not display in the Gmail web client or in the Gmail Android client – again, only the Thunderbird Inbox. I have not observed this behavior with any other senders’ e-mails. This appears to be a missing font issue, but I cannot find anything to change in the limited Thunderbird options that might fix it. Any ideas?

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You could view the raw message, extract the problematic section decode it to see what the characters are.
1. Select the message, then click Other Actions > View Source.
2. Look for the HTML section. It will be underneath these lines
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
3. Copy all the text up to the end of section marker – it looks something like this with double dashes start and end:
–_000_7D0DB6B3192A5B4D8614844B351BDAD1FBBB4A2668EIOMH01travel_–
4. Paste the text into the decoder and click Decode: https://www.base64decode.org/
5. Copy the decoded HTML and paste it here, after removing the email address and other private info.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks for the responses.

Fallback Character Encoding of UTF-8 on the Inbox and on the folder that contains the UPS messages did not work.

The raw messages do not contain a “base64” line, and the base64 decoder did nothing, regardless of what I pasted in there.

However, I now know that the source of the Subject line and the two following lines looks like this:

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?WW91ciBVUFMgUGFja2FnZSB3YXMgZGVsaXZlcmVkAAAA?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=—-NextPart_1434742371050.0005460663

So UTF-8 is involved somehow. I have already tried setting incoming mail to UTF-8 in Options, but the existing messages don’t change.

Any other thoughts?

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Thunderbird is working correctly if it shows that subject line.

cheers, Paul

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Yes, so I am confirming that TB is working correctly, as you implied in post #5.

cheers, Paul

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As jwoods pointed out, TB is NOT displaying the question marks inside diamonds; rather, it is displaying upright rectangles, each of which contains four circles (like a domino).

So, it sounds to me like TB is NOT working correctly, since it is not decoding UTF-8 input correctly.

Regarding the possible encoding problem: remember that this problem did not exist before TB 38, and it does not exist when the same messages are viewed in any other application, Windows or Android.

Sure looks to me like something changed with UTF-8 decoding in TB 38.

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Thanks, I will try to get UPS to fix it.

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Good luck!

cheers, Paul

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FYI, response from UPS. I had specifically pointed out the string of capital letter A’s that appeared to be creating the problem.

“Consulted the technical department with a transcript of your E-mail. This is a spamming prevention that some E-mail providers may have set-up. Go through their email spamjunk filtering set-up so that UPS emails are not blocked or check their SPAMJUNK folder for the UPS email.”

Basically, they’re not changing it.

I am still curious as to why the junk characters were not visible in pre-38 Thunderbird, but I’m not going to spend any more time on this.

Thanks for all responses.

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I just downloaded TB 38. I hope UPS is the only problem with it.

Remember the free Mozbackup for backing up your TB files. I backup nightly.

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