Ralph Shumaker wrote: > Ralph Shumaker wrote: >> As I go from one (plain text) message to the next, Thunderbird >> sometimes displays one message (or a string of them) with a nice >> font. Others are displayed in a freakish font that is barely >> readable. Increasing the font size helps the bad one from about 50% >> ease of readability to about 90%. The other one just becomes more >> pleasant, but a have to page down more. >> >> Can anyone tell me why Thunderbird is doing this? I don't really want >> to select a default font that will over ride fonts in formatted >> messages. But why is Thunderbird flip flopping between two different >> fonts for *unformatted* messages? > > > Going back and forth between some of the emails, and noticing that all > emails seemingly were consistently shown with either the good font or > the bad one, I decided to investigate further. > > Having been away from my email for about a month, and having just gone > through the email awaiting me, I had over 2,000 emails in my Trash > folder. None of those are marked, so I went through and marked each one > that show the horrible font. I was surprised that it was fewer than I > expected. And I *do* see some trends: > > It seems that it originates with only emails from a few individuals: > jim > DJA > Brad Beyenhof > David De Lucca > Jean Bréfort > Louis Luangkesorn > philip > Phil Karn > > Emails from these individuals, some show the bad font, some do not. > Emails from other individuals (including myself) which display the bad > font are always quoting emails from these fellows that show the bad > font. But not always. Sometimes, even though others quote from emails > with the bad font, their replies go back to showing the good font. > > Some quoting keeps the bad font surviving several generations. > > jim originated many threads. Some of them display with the bad font. > One thread in particular has every message in the thread (except for the > final one) showing the bad font. Overall, most of jim's messages > display with the good font. > > Probably half of DJA's message display with the bad font (at least of > the ones in my Trash folder -- a decent number of messages from the > list, I keep, perhaps 5%). > > Tracy's messages normally did not show the bad font unless he was > quoting from one of the fellows listed above, yet one message that he > forwarded (effectively beginning the thread) showed up displaying the > bad font. > > I guess now I just need to see if I can find the common element. (I had > probably ought to turn off automatic deletion of old messages in the > Trash folder until I finish my forensics. :) ) >
The clue might be with header lines Content-Type: or possibly Content-Transfer-Encoding: Or is could be with your own thunderbird? What version are you using, and what are the settings on the "Preferences > Display > Fonts and Encodings" dialog? I wouldn't mind looking at a few examples. I would think a good way to send them might be to first save them (File > Save as .. xxx.eml), then package them in a tarball or zip and send them directly to me (or post in pastebin.com or pastebin.ca) Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
