Apple Mail space bar encodes as dagger symbol

Mail 16.O space bar encodes as dagger symbol. Only Mail, incoming and outgoing. Checked substitutions, fonts, keyboards. Been doing it years now - any thoughts?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Feb 16, 2026 4:35 AM

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Posted on Feb 17, 2026 7:59 AM

Eggs2265 wrote:

I see it in original ... emails.


So you can produce the dagger when typing in an otherwise totally blank Mail New Message pane, without purposely making an nbsp via Option + Space?


In your Mail Settings > Composing, is it set to Rich Text or Plain Text? Whatever it is, try changing it to the other one.


I'm pretty sure no recipients see your daggers, because having the legacy MacRoman encoding used instead of Unicode is extremely strange.

21 replies

Apple Mail space bar encodes as dagger symbol

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