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

Anonymous

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

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132 answers

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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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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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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Anonymous

2019-03-18T09:27:50+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.

Exactly - we too lose the original. The draft in the sent folder is corrupted as well.
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Anonymous

2019-03-18T16:15:52+00:00

In my previous post, I mentioned how one message did not contain an http link. I asked the sender of that message to describe the app/device she used to send the message to me. She stated: The email was sent through my gmail account from my Apple laptop, Chrome bring the browser.

ElBurgo, does your problem occur when there are no http links? Or, are the messages to which you're replying coming from an Apple/Chrome environment?

I hope someone who knows how to fix this problem will chime in.....
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