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

Wow, thank you so much! I've been looking for this for a long time now and this did the trick. Also interesting to see the answer coming from The Netherlands, my country.

Thanks again,

Ronald

I have had the same problems, too. It appears on my machine that McAfee "auto-enabled" output email scanning on 6 March 2019. You can check your Sent Items folder to see when the scanning started on your computer. I've disabled the McAfee Outlook Add In which then enables the McAfee Anti-Spam tab, from which you can turn off the output email scanning. I haven't seen McAfee owning up to any of this.

You say this is a solution. You have solution even bolded, but this is NOT a solution. It's more of a hostage situation.

You're essentially saying Microsoft engineers have done this by design.  This is purposeful.

That makes absolutely no sense. more likely these uses characters were caused by some bug they choose not to fix, because they want you to use the Group conversation view or the browser view. Basically trying to hold the users hostage from how they normally reply to messages to the other ways MS wants them to reply.

Every day I'm finding more and more ways in which Office 365 is not the promised gold Microsoft sells it to be.

Hello Vanessa,

We are still in process the testing. The situation has not been resolved. It has proven to be quite challenging to find a group policy to change smart quotes behaviour ("You can prevent it by turning off smart quotes in email").

BR,

Sam

Hello Vanessa,

Thank you for the suggestions and we will troubleshoot this issue further tomorrow on Thursday.

This issue has also occurred with a HTML formatted message when a http-link is in the body.

I will test the fixes explained in the other article via group policy to see if they have any effect:

"By setting the message format as you're composing it to either plain text or HTML by using the More options (…) menu, and selecting Switch to plain text or Switch to HTML."

> set message format to HTML as default for all

"The characters the author used are not supported by the recipients character set - this is very common with smart quotes (affecting ' " - ... ). You can prevent it by turning off smart quotes in email.

Disabling this feature under the Tools menu keeps special characters in a format that most email encodings can render."

> disable smart quotes for all

"Under the Encoding Option there is a Preferred encoding for outgoing messages drop-down list.

Click on the arrow to expand the drop-down list and select Uniode (UTF-8) or another encoding that corresponding language you are typing."

> set UTF-8 as for outgoing messages as default for all

I`ll have to find the answers for the questions you posted if these changed do not fix the issue:

If the suggestion above doesn’t help, please let us know the following information:

1. The whole screenshots reproducing this issue.
2. Your Outlook client version details such as 1704(8067.2020).
3. Have you ever done anything when this issue happened?
4. Are these senders and group who encounter this issue in pure cloud or sync from on-premises? In other words, when this issue occurs, are these mailboxes in pure cloud or on-premises?

BR,

Sam