HowTo make Firefox & Thunderbird Auto Detect Character Encoding ?

[Curt]

Living in Denmark, and therefor being neighbor to almost a quarter of the world, I very often read emails or homepages that are using charsets (Character Encoding) different from my local western version or UTF-8. In both Firefox and Thunderbird there is this little line in View  : > Character Encoding > Auto Detect > saying "disabled" ("OFF"). I have no idea when or where I should have disabled this feature, but I so wanna enable it. But I can't - I mean, so far I couldn't - the option has been nowhere to be found. I find it totally embarrassing that in 2008 I still have to change the charset again and again myself. Why on earth can't I find this little place where I have to make a mark, so Firefox and Thunderbird will auto-detect & set the appropriate Character Encoding (charset) themselves? Please tell me HowTo !

Or tell me what program to install to make it happen - I have not been able to find any Mozilla extension to do it.



Edited for English terms

[tomos]

hmmm
View > Character Encoding > Auto Detect >
was OFF here, but I was able to change it to "universal" (or Chinese if I wanted to)
Likewise in Tbird ...
which is no help to you beyond making you feel even worse about it probably

[Curt]

Yes, you are right, tomos: One can change it to whatever encoding, except the one I request: "Auto Detect". Even "Universal" will not display all mails / homepages the same way as the writer intended. But if there is "OFF" - where is then the option to set Auto Detect "ON" ?

[tomos]

Yes, you are right, tomos: One can change it to whatever encoding, except the one I request: "Auto Detect". Even "Universal" will not display all mails / homepages the same way as the writer intended. But if there is "OFF" - where is then the option to set Auto Detect "ON" ?

sounds like it doesn't exist then (yet?)
or probably more simply that "universal" should do what you want, but doesnt

[Curt]

Yes, again you are right, tomos. But this is the very problem inside my little head: If you click Page Information (again: what would be the English term?) you will instantly know what character encoding was used. And if I know, then the fox and the T-bird also knows. So why the #*** won't they auto-detect&set it, accordingly?? This is 2008 and they are launching this browser and this email client all over the world: auto-detection of international character encoding is literally a must-have!!

[morphication]

ooo, dude! i so found it out!!!  . sad though, that the mozilla people made it so hard to figure it out!!! i do expect more user friendly stuff.

and here it comes:
1. tools -> options -> display -> fonts (bottom, right) -> UNselect "apply the default character encoding to all incoming messages" checkbox. -> ok
2. view -> character encoding -> auto-detect -> universal
3. restart(!).

there you go! without restarting, thunderbird does nothing, which is most irritating. you do expect thunderbird to be able to set stuff like this without having to restart.

anyway... now my thunderbird is able to detect and view for example cyrillic windows encoding, windows default encoding, utf-8, etc. etc. i am so happy!!! 

[Curt]

- thanks a lot for telling and directing, morphication 

I didn't had the default encoding apply to incoming messages, though. But the "auto-detect > universal" never met my eye until you told about it, so now I am just waiting for someone to mail me in a foreign language...
A big Thank You!

[morphication]

so now I am just waiting for someone to mail me in a foreign language...
A big Thank You!

aaam... how about writing yourself an email don't forget to feedback here weather it works or not.

[Curt]

... how about writing yourself an email

- far too much trouble!   

[morphication]

. you have to set up regional settings in order to write, i guess. well, pm me an email and i can send you a lot of ä's, ö's, ü's (a, o, u umlauts) at least