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
    2019-05-07T06:12:31+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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  2. 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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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-08T23:49:08+00:00

    Interesting as these characters are different to the ones I get (which are very obscure Chinese dialect characters that would be known only to a specialist). My question really is whether this is all an indication of Chinese government monitoring of emails; not being paranoid, just recognising facts - anyone who has been in China, especially in Tibet or Sinkiang will know that the situation is worse than even imagined in George Orwell's 1984 and that their government is heavily engaged in spying on other countries.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-05-15T11:16:01+00:00

    I also have a similar problem. When replying or forwarding emails, Outlook sends a blank email to the person(s) it goes to and it is also blank in my sent items, all text is lost.  All the recipient receives in the text field is a strange Chinese type character such as these ( 皰냶ĝ, 뀐놎ĝ, 왐디ĝ )

    Any help would be appreciated since I'm just an old retired guy who isn't very well versed in all that electronic stuff :-) Thank you

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-05-15T14:27:56+00:00

    BeRo_52_CH,

    If you have the McAfee anti-virus system scanning your email, did you try disabling it?  That worked for me.

    C3SD

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