455968 - Compose option to change character set - should allow you to force ASCII

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Richard Neill]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072403 Mandriva/3.0.1-1mdv2008.1 (2008.1) Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.16

When writing messages where I have cut/pasted text, I frequently get the message
below:

--------------------
The message you composed contains characters not found in the selected Character Encoding. While you can choose a different Character Encoding, it is usually safe to use Unicode (UTF-8)....   
[Cancel]                                   [Send anyway]    [Send in UTF-8]
---------------------

That's fine, but many mail clients can't actually cope with anything other than plain ASCII. 


What I actually want is for TB to highlight the offending non-ascii characters so that I can manually replace them. There are usually one or two that creep in, and often the fix is just to manually replace things such as MS "smart-quotes" by standard ASCII quotes. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.


Expected Results:  
TB should give me some way to fix the message, by identifying non ASCII characters, so that I can replace them by their ASCII equivalents. We need a button that says either:

"Force conversion to ASCII before sending"

or 

"Highlight the non-ASCII characters"


An alternative would be to persuade TB to treat all non-ascii characters (such as MS smartquotes) as spelling errors, to be underlined.