Outlook 2016 - chinese characters appearing in messages when replying/forwarding

Anonymous
2017-04-24T13:29:42+00:00

Hello,

I am investigating an issue with Outlook 2016 and seemingly random appearances of chinese characters in email messages when replying or forwarding. I have a Exchange 365 hybrid environment and O365 pro plus office installed on workstations.

I have not been able to pinpoint a common factor why or when this happens. It is possible to reproduce the issue by sending a plain text message to a O365 group and then reply/forward the same message > header information is transformed into "chinese" (I have no idea what they actually are) characters. This does not happen with all groups or senders which is why I am looking into Outlook at the moment.

I`ve tried to change Outlook settings: use UTF8 with mailto protocol, change the encoding settings to different options etc. without success. 

I`d like to hear how would you start to troubleshoot this issue?

BR,

Sam

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-03-18T05:29:05+00:00

    My issue is similar to ElBurgo: 

    Body of text is replaced by 2 or 3 Chinese characters. 

    It's always a Reply; not a new email.

    Unlike ElBurgo:

    No signature has been present when the problem occurs.

    All but one time, the messages being replied to contained http links.

    It's awful because the original body of the sent message is lost (there is no record of it).  The sent mail folder shows the email with the Chinese characters in the body.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-03-15T15:07:10+00:00

    This sounds about right. I've had this issue before with a client, they were using Thunderbird, receive an email from someone on an iPhone and the Chinese characters would show up. Had to adjust the Unicode and it went away. 

    I'm suspecting it's the same with this issue. People are replying from another email client or the Unicode on the sender/receiver is out of alignment. 

    Hope this helps.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-03-04T21:13:22+00:00

    For the record, I have seen this issue occur when my friend and neighbor's Android device texted my wife's iPhone 7... She sent the same message via Messenger and there was no issue. It's doesn't seem limited to just Outlook for iOS but the least Microsoft could do would be to provide an adequate explanation and workaround. Unfortunately for us and their reputation they are doing nothing and just dragging their feet...

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-03-04T10:39:16+00:00

    For us the issue appears when an Outlook email signature is set up.  For us the body of the text is replaced by just 2 or 3 Chinese(?)  characters.   

    It's an occasional issue, but the following two things are always present:

    It's always a "Reply" - NOT a New Email

    There is a signature

    The following do not seem to alter it:

    Smart quotes enabled or not 

    HTML or Rich text format 

    Encoding is set to Unicode UTF-8

    We only ever use Spanish as an additional language and it doesn't seem to matter whether that is loaded or not

    It doesn't seem to matter if the original inbound email has, or has not, any accented characters - and/or was written in English or Spanish (as would be expected using UTF-8)

    Microsoft Outlook for Office 365 MSO Version 1901 (Build 16.0.11231.20174 64 Bit

    Hope this helps..

    Burgo

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-02-11T18:44:39+00:00

    We are having the same problem with the Chinese characters, we were able to replicate it (no solution yet)

    One of our users has a Spanish last name with an accent (i.e.: Pérez). When this user opens an email in an iPhone using an app other than Outlook, the Chinese characters are there.

    When the same user opens the same email in the same iPhone using Outlook, the Chinese characters are gone.

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