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
    2019-05-08T10:00:51+00:00

    Today i send an email to some customers (around 45) as BCC to inform them about someting

    I enabled on the email the Request Delivery and Read Receipt.

    All the Read receipts i get back ALL have those Chinese letter in them 

    Language is set to English and Greek , nothing else.

    No McAfee Add-in.

    We are using Outlook 2016 with O365

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-07T06:12:31+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-09T05:22:29+00:00

    Shortly after my last post on March 18, I disabled McAfee email scanning.  I haven't had the Chinese character problem since then.  At the time, I sat and pondered what had changed in my system since the problem started.  I had recently taken note of the McAfee "Scanned by..." message appended to the bottom of my emails.  I went into McAfee and disabled email scanning.  I can't remember exactly, but I didn't think I enabled email scanning when I installed McAfee (or if it was enabled at installation, I thought I disabled it).  My point being, I don't know if it auto-enabled during a McAfee update or if I am simply not remembering the fact that I had enabled it.  In any case, disabling email scanning seems to have fixed the problem.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-04-06T09:52:55+00:00

    Just seen this courtesy of a google search, which is interesting:

    https://community.mcafee.com/t5/Consumer-General-Discussions/Outlook-2016-and-McAfee-add-in-causing-sending-of-blank-emails/td-p/621010 

    Could it be that these add ins from anti virus / mail scanning software are somehow shafting the encoding??

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-04-06T09:45:55+00:00

    No joy with us - the locale and Outlook language options are both set to English (United Kingdom).  A couple of tests have shown a link with downloading external content.  We use McAfee and it has started appending a line at the bottom of emails:

    ![](https://secureimages.mcafee.com/common/affiliateImages/mfe/logo.png) Scanned by McAfee All Access - Total Protection™ and confirmed virus-free.

    However, this morning instead of chinese characters appearing the outgoing emails are totally blank.  When we "Reply" to an email, we get the warning that some content is on an external server - in this case it is the Mcafee logo which links back to their site.  A few quick tests seem to work if we do not download the external content. 

    I'd seen this thread while casting around: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2854787/email-message-body-is-blank-in-outlook

    There was a COM add in "Mcafee  Addin" which we have disabled and will see if that makes a difference.

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