# How cani disable picture in Thunderbird?

## Tony0945

This is driving me nuts.  When I open thunderbird there are pictures of pies and hearts appearing without even opening an e-mail. pie pictures are I'm sure comming from Baker's square.

It disturbs me that an e-mail can cause a picture to appear (and what else can it do?) without even being opened.

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## mike155

```
Edit -> Preferences -> General -> "Thunderbird Start Page"
```

Disable: "When Thunderbird launches, show the Start Page in the message area"

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## spica

That can also be utf8 glyph like U+1F382

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## Tony0945

 *spica wrote:*   

> That can also be utf8 glyph like U+1F382

 

Looking like a floating slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream on a plate? I'm sure it came from an e-mail ad.

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## Tony0945

 *mike155 wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> Edit -> Preferences -> General -> "Thunderbird Start Page"
> ```
> ...

 

So far so good! Even a little faster without the thunderbird logo.

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## spica

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> I'm sure it came from an e-mail ad.

  *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> appearing without even opening an e-mail

 

Do you observe ads without opening emails? Can you show a screenshot?

Does it look like this https://i.postimg.cc/tJ3952F6/image.png ?

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## Tony0945

 *spica wrote:*   

> Does it look like this https://i.postimg.cc/tJ3952F6/image.png ?

 

Yes!

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## Hu

If I interpret that picture correctly, I think what is happening is that someone sent you an e-mail with a "subject" that has emoji instead of text, and Thunderbird is helpfully rendering the emoji.  Emoji are technically just text with weird looking "letters."  If I am right, then this is only a risk if Thunderbird's parser for mapping the high-numbered characters to their standard emoji is flawed.  I don't know if you can suppress this, but I would start with "Thunderbird disable emoji" as search terms.

Interestingly, I tried to include the following in my post: *Quote:*   

> For example, the following is text, not an image in the usual HTML sense: , which is why I can use an underline on it even though it is a graphic emoji named "Ring."

 It previewed OK, but failed to post until I removed the emoji character, which renders the sentence rather pointless.

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## Tony0945

Thanks, Hu.  They disappear after I erased all Baker's Square emails. Then they came back.  

Haven't appeared since I followed Mike155's advice, but could be a coincidence.

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## spica

Hu,

Thank you that you were also able to reproduce the problem with posting multibyte characters on the forum.

I also tried to post these utf8 glyphs here but it seems that forum's database does not accept such multibyte sequences.

If it is mysql, it needs something like utf8mb4.

I wanted to let admin team know that this case exists and ask if it start working after forum engine upgrade, but I don't know how to explain the problem without attaching such glyphs  :Sad: 

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## Tony0945

Thanks again, Hu. I turned HTML back on, it makes Amazon emails easier to read, and turned emojis off. So far so good.

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## Hu

 *spica wrote:*   

> I wanted to let admin team know that this case exists and ask if it start working after forum engine upgrade, but I don't know how to explain the problem without attaching such glyphs 

 You could describe steps to post the glyph.  For example, the Ring glyph I intended to post above is character 0x1f48d.  I can type that in Vim by doing:Enter Insert mode.Press and hold control.Press v (to get a ^V).Release control.  Type U.  Note: must be capitalized if your target character is greater than 0xffff.Type the hexadecimal number, in this case 1f48d.  Hit space to advise Vim that no more characters are coming.You have now inserted that text into your Vim buffer.  You can then use standard Vim commands to move it to the X selection buffer, and paste it into a post.  As a test, let's see if I can post Zero-Width-Space (which is 0x200b, making it below the 0xffff marker, and therefore potentially having a different encoding rule on the server).​  Note that Vim can insert characters in the 0-0xffff range using ^Vuxxxx instead of ^VUXXXXXXXX.

[Edit: yes, I can post glyph 0x200b.  It seems only things above 0xffff are blocked.  Having done this test, I now remember that I saw someone else use ZWSP years ago, and I even used it myself a few times when posting commands that would be dangerous for people to run blindly, so that anyone who copied it would get a syntax error when the ZWSP split the dangerous command in two.]

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> Thanks again, Hu. I turned HTML back on, it makes Amazon emails easier to read, and turned emojis off. So far so good.

 Yes, a distressing number of senders seem to think it's a feature that their e-mail is unreadable if you stick to text/plain.

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