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

Vanessa - 

Perhaps a coder at Microsoft left it in by accident.  It should be pretty easy for them to find it in the source code

https://www.reddit.com/r/translator/comments/5pp9pf/chinese\_english\_weird\_text\_found\_in\_outlook\_email/:

<DIV lang=en-us class=OutlookMessageHeader align="left" DIR="LTR"> <FONT Face="C" Size=2>-<BR> <B>F</B> B <BR> <B>S</B> M<BR> <B>T</B> H<BR> <B>S</B> R<BR> </FONT> </DIV><DIV></DIV>

I think the fact that the text is arbitrary and the same for many people on the internet is a pretty clear indication that this was accidentally included in the product.  

Please escalate to engineering.  I just found the same thing in Outlook at our organization.  To my knowledge I am the first person to experience it.

It does appear to be at least 14 years old though, as I find an occurance of this text in a 2004 email from:

****Personal Information Removed*******:

****Personal Information Removed*******

It crops up every now and again.  The source seems to have something to do with Exchange.  Someone somewhere probably knows the answer...  Good luck with the regression tests!  :-)

Actually, here is a better explanation: https://superuser.com/questions/1114966/chinese-letters-showing-up-when-replying-to-email-in-outlook I went ahead and tried reproducing the results.  Here are the steps I took, as the explanations may not be clear to everyone reading this.  This also gives you steps you can use to reproduce the results, which may be more convincing to Microsoft.   And let's be clear, this issue not nonsense text.  This is very specific text that is being noticed probably by thousands of people at least.  This is a bug, and this needs to be fixed. 1. I found this in my email when I replied: 䐼噉㰾䐯噉‾䐼噉氠湡㵧湥甭⁳汣獡㵳畏汴潯䵫獥慳敧效摡牥愠楬湧∽敬瑦•䥄㵒䰢剔㸢㰠但呎䘠捡㵥吢•楓敺㈽ⴾ䈼㹒㰠㹂㱆䈯‾⁉⁛䈼伾⼼㹂樠䈼㹒㰠㹂㱓䈯‾㱏剂‾䈼吾⼼㹂䤠䈼㹒†䈼匾⼼㹂删䈼㹒†㰠剂‾⼼但呎‾⼼䥄㹖 2. Paste them into this unicode converter: https://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion/ into the second box down labeled "Characters" and harvest the Hexidecimal section:  443C 5649 3C3E 442F 5649 203E 443C 5649 6C20 6E61 3D67 6E65 752D 2073 6C63 7361 3D73 754F 6C74 6F6F 4D6B 7365 6173 6567 6548 6461 7265 6120 696C 6E67 223D 656C 7466 2022 4944 3D52 4C22 5254 3E22 3C20 4F46 544E 4620 6361 3D65 5422 2022 6953 657A 323D 2D3E 423C 3E52 3C20 3E42 3C46 422F 203E 2049 205B 423C 4F3E 2F3C 3E42 6A20 423C 3E52 3C20 3E42 3C53 422F 203E 3C4F 5242 203E 423C 543E 2F3C 3E42 4920 423C 3E52 2020 423C 533E 2F3C 3E42 5220 423C 3E52 2020 3C20 5242 203E 2F3C 4F46 544E 203E 2F3C 4944 3E56 3. If we try to convert those bytes directly into ASCII we get nothing interesting.  But if we shift the byte order (since Unicode can support either the high or low byte first), 443C becomes 3C44, 5649 becomes 4956, etc.  You can use your favorite text editor:  3C44 4956 206C 616E 673D 7376 2063 6C61 7373 3D4F 7574 6C6F 6F6B 4D65 7373 6671 6548 6561 6465 7220 616C 6967 6E3D 226C 6566 7422 2044 4952 3D22 4C54 5222 320E 3C46 4F4E 5420 4661 6365 3D22 4322 2053 697A 653D 323E 2D3C 4252 3E20 3C42 346E 3C2F 423E 2046 2020 3C42 523E 203C 423E 533C 2F42 3E20 643C 4252 3E20 3C42 354E 3C2F 423E 2056 3C42 523E 2020 3C42 4300 4800 4100 5200 3C2F 423E 204A 3C42 53E2 2020 203C 2F46 4F4E 543E 203C 2F44 4956 3E3C 4449 563E 3C2F 4449 563E  4. Paste this into http://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/hex-to-ascii.htm , and get: <DIV lang=sv class=OutlookMessfqeHeader align="left" DIR="LTR"2<FONT Face="C" Size=2>-<BR> <B4n</B> F  <BR> <B>S</B> d<BR> <B5N</B> V<BR>  <BCHAR</B> J<BSâ   </FONT> </DIV><DIV></DIV> 5. Paste that into a text file and rename to end in .html.  6. Open in IE and get the following: F B  S M T H S R There is really no other explanation I can think of that than that this code got embedded somewhere in Microsoft code unexpectedly and only gets activated by chance every once in a while.

Is there any update or solution to this issue?

Hello Vanessa,

As with many of the people on here I am having the same issue whereby a response by way of Outlook to an Office 365 Group email results in the subject, to, cc, bcc of the email being represented by 'chinese' characters. This does not happen when responding from the Office 365 app.

Please can you update us on whether there is a fix to this?

Yours

Adam