If the email application of the sender is broken or misconfigured, plain text emails might not include information about the character encoding used. If you receive such messages, choose View ▸ Character Encoding from the main menu and change the currently chosen character encoding to an appropriate one that might be the encoding used by the sender. You have to make this change every time you view the message.
To make this the default setting, go to Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Mail Preferences ▸ General ▸ Message Display ▸ Default character encoding.
In the unlikely event that you would like to change the default character encoding for messages that you send, go to Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Composer Preferences ▸ Default Behavior ▸ Character encoding.
This setting only refers to Plain Text messages as HTML messages always use UTF-8 encoding.
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