Thunderbird 1.5 (for Windows) is a great program for doing email! And it handles just about any language under the sun. So I just love it.

The default installation for Thunderbird 1.5 makes the Western (ISO-8859-1) the default encoding for incoming and outgoing messages. This is great if you stick to English, but.....

For most everyone, I recommend setting these to default to Unicode (UTF-8). This will include support for almost all languages universally. There are some cases where you want to use an encoding for a particular language, and those are listed in the Language-Specific section. (see Japanese and Hebrew for examples)

To set the default encoding in Thunderbird:

1. Go to the Tools menu and choose Options
2. Click on the Display icon
3. Click on the Fonts tab
4. Under the Character Encodings section, set the Outgoing Mail and Incoming Mail settings to Unicode (UTF-8).