Fedora standardizes on UTF-8 encoding, and most people e.g. on fedora-devel use UTF-8. It would be helpful (and, appropriate to Fedora policy, I think) for Thunderbird to also use UTF-8 by default. For newsgroups, it is currently necessary to change the encoding individually for each group. (I don't have a way to check right now if, or to what extent, this applies to mail also.)
We found this bug in the upstream database (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224391) and believe that it is more appropriate to let it be resolved upstream. Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized upstream bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates. Thank you for the bug report.
Thank you for the reply. I disagree that this is the same bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224391 is about outgoing mail/news. The problem I am having is with incoming news. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
(In reply to comment #2) > I disagree that this is the same bug. > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224391 is about outgoing > mail/news. The problem I am having is with incoming news. Sorry if that wasn't > clear. OK, than it doesn't make any sense to me. Most incoming messages have Content-Type header with charset variable set, which of course governs what kind of encoding is used for given message. Moreover, default encoding for situations when no Content-Type is used (which is quite rare these days) could be configured in Edit/Preferences/Display/Formatting/Fonts/Character Encodings. This is not even CLOSED/UPSTREAM, this is really NOTABUG.
> Most incoming messages have Content-Type header with charset variable set Then I suppose the real bug is that Thunderbird consistently ignores this, at least for newsgroups. (And I can verify that it is, in fact, ignoring the encoding. Which is to say if I View Source, I can see that a certain message is us-ascii, that I don't have "override encoding for all messages" enabled, and yet the encoding is being set to utf-8, i.e. the default.) Anyway, the original request was to change the default encoding to be UTF-8. I don't think NOTABUG is an appropriate resolution for that (WONTFIX, maybe...).
I reported this upstream.