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
    2019-11-01T20:22:03+00:00

    I am having the issue while sending emails via the microsoft secure mail.  We have two companies on two servers with two separate urls and two different states.  It has never happened when sending information to an external person.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-11-01T20:24:58+00:00

    One more thing - it happens when there is an attachment in the microsoft secure mail.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-11-05T12:39:55+00:00

    Hi All,

    I had the same issue and fixed this by doing the following:

    Open Outlook, click on File> Options> Language>

    Under Office Display Language there were 2 options:

    1.    Match Microsoft Windows <preferred>

    2.    English

    I moved these around so that they were displayed as follows:

    1.    English <preferred>

    2.    Match Microsoft Windows

    After restarting Outlook the issue had resolved.

    Hope this helps.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-01-13T13:46:38+00:00

    Hi All,

    Our organisation was also affected by this issue: both Chinese-alike garbled characters in Outlook Calendar responses, To-do comments and OneNote entries. What seemed odd to us, the problem was noticed only on the newly delivered Latitudes received from Dell Nederland and when using the OEM Windows 10 image. Previously, we were using our in-house deployment image, and the issue never happened. It made us wonder that most likely, the problem lays in Windows 10 image-specific settings.

    We tried the solutions suggested above, including changing the languages both in Outlook and the system, changing encoding for outgoing messages and the language preference for headers, etc. The issue eventually came back after a week or so.

    What was a helpful finding is that the issue does not appear when the Exchange Cached Mode in Outlook is disabled or when the users switched to OWA for some time. It pointed us into the settings that would affect the OST file, or other caches of Outlook saved on the local drive.

    It turned out that in our case, the issue was caused by the setting "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support". With new Dells, the OEM Windows 10 image already had the setting enabled by default - and as you can probably figure out by now, it was disabled in our previous deployment images.

    The setting is available in Control Panel > Region > Administrative > Change system locale > uncheckthe box next to Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language supportand restart the device.

    I hope the above helps others too!

    Best,

    Marcin

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-02-12T13:26:28+00:00

    Hi Marcin,

    Just to confirm that Marcin's answer is the only right solution to the Chinese garbled character issue. We just bought new Dell Latitudes and are located in The Netherlands. When we unchecked the checkbox next to Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support  and restarted the issue was resolved.

    Thanks Marcin, after 2 days of digging I can peacefully go to sleep!

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