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
    2017-04-26T11:24:34+00:00

    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

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-04-25T06:46:51+00:00

    Hi Sam,

    I suggest you open Outlook, click on File> Options> Language> under Choose Editing Languages check if any other language is enabled, if yes highlight it and click on Remove.

    Based on your description, this issue should be related to your client side rather than server side. Please try HTML format message to see if the same issue occurs.

    Additionally, there is a similar thread for your reference: Outlook email text become weird characters.

    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?

    With the information above, we can move forward.

    Best Regards,

    Vanessa

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