flyguy wrote:

Most of the emails I get display correctly with Western (ISO-8859-1),
but a few have some strange characters (e.g., †) unless I select
Unicode (UTF-8). Occasionally, this also happens on web sites. The Help
info doesn't seem to match my choices in Preferences.

Is there anyway to have SM 2 use the correct encoding automatically?

Yes and no.

Most emails sent to you have info in the (hidden) header that tells the receiving program (in our case, SeaMonkey) what encoding to use. For example, your post said:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Sometimes (especially with webmails), this information is absent, so SeaMonkey will fall back on whatever default you have set. If you look at your prefs under Mail & Newsgroups | Character Encoding, the first setting is your default for message display. If most of your correspondence is in Western, this is a good choice.

And sometimes the sending program lies to SeaMonkey and specifies an encoding different from the one used to compose the message.

In cases where the info is absent or the sending program lies, you have to manually select the correct encoding. Sorry. But when the incoming message is well-formed (contains accurate info on encoding), SeaMonkey does automatically select the correct encoding.

The situation with websites is similar. If they tell the truth, SeaMonkey is fine. If they are silent or misleading, SeaMonkey can guess wrong or be deceived.

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher

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