Weird "AAAAAA' characters in some emails

Question

Apple Mail 5.0 is displaying some weird characters in some of my emails.
It looks like an encoding problem but whatever setting i change it remains the same.
I can select the text and copy it to Textedit so i can read it.
What can be the problem?

Answer 1

Those tall rectangles with two rows of two characters indicate a particular character that Firefox did not find in the font it is using. Often this is because Firefox is substituting or falling back to a generic font because the font specified by the site isn't available.
In the case of icons, the most common scenario is that a downloadable font is blocked. Github uses the "octicons" font (at least when I visit): https://github.global.ssl.fastly.net/assets/octicons-bccfe7abf7461ed10568dd044425080f7de09889.woff
If you use the NoScript extension, offsite fonts may require their own exception to load.
If you do not have any extensions that could be filtering the font, check the general setting:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste '''about:config''' in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste '''gfx''' and pause while the list is filtered
(3) If the '''gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled''' preference is bolded and "user set" to false, double-click it to restore it to its default value of true.
Any luck?