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

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

Hi Sam,

I suggest you open Outlook, click on File> Options> Language> under Choose Editing Languages check if any other language is enabled, if yes highlight it and click on Remove.

Based on your description, this issue should be related to your client side rather than server side. Please try HTML format message to see if the same issue occurs.

Additionally, there is a similar thread for your reference: Outlook email text become weird characters.

If the suggestion above doesn’t help, please let us know the following information:

1. The whole screenshots reproducing this issue.
2. Your Outlook client version details such as 1704(8067.2020).
3. Have you ever done anything when this issue happened?
4. Are these senders and group who encounter this issue in pure cloud or sync from on-premises? In other words, when this issue occurs, are these mailboxes in pure cloud or on-premises?

With the information above, we can move forward.

Best Regards,

Vanessa

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!

Hi All,

I'm glad to read that my solution works for you. As an update, I've noticed today that the same beta setting is causing other issues with Outlook as well.

 We had a couple of users complaining that when they open an Outlook message and save as on their device, only two latest emails in the thread are saved in the .msg file.

Unchecking the same beta setting resolves the issue with saving Outlook emails as well.

Just to reiterate:

Go to Control Panel > Region > Administrative > Change system locale > uncheck the box next to Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support and restart the device.

I hope you find this update helpful as well!

Best,

Marcin

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.