1568412 - The sent e-mails from Yahoo! displayed to the sender with "?" instead of the (greek) characters.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1435903

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Anastasios Lisgaras]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0

Steps to reproduce:

On Thunderbird 60.8.0 [in Debian GNU/Linux 9.9 (stretch)] I've added my two emails accounts :

• https://webmail.gandi.net/
• https://mail.yahoo.com/
  When I send e-mails with Greek characters from the gandi.net the recipients have no problem.
  But when I send e-mails from the same Thunderbird by my @yahoo.gr account with Greek characters, then the recipient receives question marks ("?").

From the Thunderbird, my sent e-mails normally appear, even more strange is that if I log in https://login.yahoo.com , and go to the folder of sent e-mails, I see all of them normally! Only recipients of these emails they see them with question marks.
If I send the same email again (from the sent messages), but from yahoo.com, then the recipient receives it without any problem!

But I have noticed, if I have digitally signed the email ( with enigmail ) then the recipient receives it without any problems - all characters (Greek and non) are displayed normally.

I have the same problem from Thunderbird 60.3.0 in Debian GNU/Linux 8.11 (jessie).

C
C.UTF-8
el_GR.utf8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

Actual results:

When I send emails with Greek characters or generally non-english characters from Yahoo account, the recipient receives the messages with '?'.
Where non-English characters are present, the recipient displayed only "?" in their place.

Expected results:

There is no problem with the Greek characters from the yahoo account.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Flanagin]

Thanks for all the info. The specificity of the issue does seem to have something to do with the way we connect to yahoo. Though I don't know why it would lose the encoding when sent from TB but regain it if you send it from Yahoo's sent folder especially since the gandi.net account works properly.

What happens if you send yourself a message, from your yahoo account to your gandi account? Do the "?" marks appear?

Comment 2

[Anastasios Lisgaras]

Probably the problem seems to concern only about a specificity of the Yahoo company and not a general problem of the Thunderbird e-mail client.

• If I send a message (through the Thunderbird) with Greek characters from my Yahoo account to my other gandi account then, it will appear with question marks ("?").

However note that : The incredible is that the messages I send and receivers they receive them with question marks ("?"), if I connect to the https://mail.yahoo.com/ and open the folder of sent messages, I normally see their content - characters appear normally, not with question marks -, and if I press resend button, then the recipient will receive the message by viewing it correctly the characters of the message(!)

• If I send a message (through the Thunderbird) with Greek characters from my gandi account to my other Yahoo account then, there is no problem - the characters are displayed correctly in the recipient (my Yahoo account).
  Whatever I send from the gandi account has no problem.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Ongoing issue with Yahoo who are corrupting mail since at least Feb. 2018.

Comment 4

[Anastasios Lisgaras]

Thank you for the answer and forgive my for double report (I hadn't seen it).

As I see, the temporary solution is to put the "mail.strictly_mime" to "true" (Preferences -> Preferences -> Advanced and click to "Config Editor...").
Are there collateral losses/disadvantages by doing this ?
(I ask because it is not preselected to true.)

I have two other temporary solutions to propose :

1. If you use gpg : Sign digitally ( with enigmail ) each sent message -then your messages will arrive without any problem in the non-ASCII (non-english) characters to their recipients.
2. As the @kwstas8es member of the Greek Ubuntu community told (personally I didn't try it yet), if you have added more than one e-mail account to the Thunderbird, you can change the SMTP outgoing server of your Yahoo account settings, in another one.
   In my case it displays the Gandi SMTP outgoing server (1, 2). In the case of @kwstas8es (because the second account he added was from Google), he showed his the gmail server.

Thank you.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

mail.strictly_mime can be set to true without causing damage. Message will be QP encoded and that results in slightly larger messages. TB made the decision to use 8bit encoding, so not 7bit QP, since all modern mail servers support it. Turned out that there's a club of servers who over more than 1.5 years have failed to get it right :-(

Yes, Enigmail encodes the entire message as one big ASCII blob, so that won't be damaged by Yahoo and friends.

Yes, TB is configurable and you can use a different outgoing SMTP server. You might run in to trouble with over-zealous SPAM detection when a message from [e-mail] is suddenly shipped out via, say, the Gandi server, or Gmail, for that matter.

We've hammered the supposedly relevant manager in Yahoo after our Thunderbird community manager made the first contact, but we haven't seen a result in two months. Yahoo seems to have one of two states:

1. Corrupt all e-mail, regardless of whether it's UTF-8 or windows-1252 encoded. Needless to say, that people writing in any of the CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) will use UTF-8 in most cases, so they won't be able to send at all.
2. Process UTF-8 mail correctly and corrupt other 8bit encodings like windows-1252 or windows-1253 (Greek).

Ryan (TB community manager), what can we do next?

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

More information here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Jorgk/8-bit_bytes_and_e-mail_corruption_at_Verizon,_Yahoo,_etc. <--- EDIT: Not working, see next comment.
This will be published as a SUMO article soon as suggested by our Thunderbird community manager.

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Damn, the URL has a dot at the end and it's not linkified. So try this:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Jorgk/8-bit_bytes_and_e-mail_corruption_at_Verizon,_Yahoo,_etc.