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Signatures in Mac version of Thunderbird

2007, December 1 - 08:11 — müzso
I had a problem with my signature file on the Mac for as long as I can remember. The default encoding of my new (outgoing) emails is set to Central European (ISO-8859-2) since I mostly correspond with my country people. My signature contains my last name and starting a new
letter always resulted in my name written as "M¸ller" instead of "Müller". Today I've found the solution here. You have to save the signature file in Western (Mac OS Roman) encoding instead of ISO-8859-2 (which is the charset of the email itself where my signature gets inserted). Shocked

In ISO-8859-2 the "ü" character is represented by the 0xFC byte, while in Western Mac OS Roman it is 0x9F. You can read a bit more about this MacRoman encoding here.

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2009, January 9 - 11:50 — müzso

Encoding in Thunderbird signatures

I had now similiar issue on Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 to be precise). If the signature file is encoded with ISO-8859-2 and the character encoding in TB is set to the same, then the "ő" character becomes "õ" which is incorrect. If the signature file is encoded in UTF-8 and TB's outgoing mail encoding is ISO-8859-2, then "ő" remains "ő".

Having experienced the same problem on different platforms, I think I can now draw the conclusion: you've to create the signature file in the default encoding of your platform (OS). Eg. in Ubuntu I'm set up to use UTF-8 by default (check the LANG environment variable by running echo $LANG in a Terminal window) and thus the signature has to have UTF-8 as well. On the Mac probably the default encoding is "Western (Mac OS Roman)" and you've to use that in your signature file as well.

So it seems the proper encoding of signature files is totally independent of the character encoding of the outgoing mail. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

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