AOL users text looks bad

[tommygunner]

I noticed that whenever I get email from AOL users the text often has &# and weird characters in it. Most of the AOL user emails I get are from idiots that can't write, but I'm wondering if AOL has some type of incompatible email system. I'm using Thunderbird and usually have html turned off.

[tedster]

Sorry it's been so very long with no response to your post, tommygunner.

By any chance are these strange characters in forwarded bits, or in quoted sections? Many versions of AOL email do a bad job of handling character entities and they end up being displayed as straight ASCII.

That's really all I've ever seen - messages that originate wholly from the AOL user come across OK for me - and I use text-only email also.