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

I use office 365 ProPlus and had the same issue.

I found a solution that worked for me: disabling all add-ins in Outlook and then enabling them back.

1. In Outlook, go to File->Options->Add-ins
2. Click on Go (right to "COM Add-ins") and un-check all add-ins that are checked in the list.
3. Click OK and exit from Outlook (File->Exit)
4. Run outlook and verify that the problem is solved.
5. I repeated stage 2 to 4 but this time checked all add-ins back and the problem seems to be solved.  

Hope it will work for you too.

Hello,

We have been able to reproduce the issue with a group of test users and a O365 group. It seems to be happening in the following fashion:

1. Plain text email is sent to O365 Group.
2. Group member is subscribing for emails sent to Groups.
3. Recipient of plain text email to Group replies to the email from user's personal inbox, i.e. replies to email that is sent as copy to group member's personal inbox based on "Subscribe" functionality.
4. Replies to Group emails from personal inbox creates Chinese character set, that replaces the previous sender's header details in the email chain.

The Chinese character issue does NOT repeat if a user replies to the email sent to the Group from the Groups view in Outlook, or from the O365 Group Conversation view in browser, or from OWA or from phone. Only when replies are sent from personal inboxes based on the O365 Group's "Subscribe" functionality.

BR,

Sam

Hi Sam,

Just take your time. I will monitor this thread. If there are any updates, please feel free to let me know.

Best Regards,

Vanessa

We were facing this as well with some new Windows 10, inTune enrolled devices with Office 2016.

This was primarily happening for us when sending updates to meeting invitations but we were able to fix this by changing the Outlook Editing Language settings (File ==> Options ==> Language) to match the system settings.

For one affected user the system locale settings were set to English (United States) but the Outlook Editing Language settings were set to English (Germany). We changed that setting in Outlook to English (United States) as well, restarted all Office Apps and since then all meeting updates are sent without any Chinese characters appearing.

Hope this helps others as well.

We are experiencing the same issue with Chinese characters with users of Office 2016 Home and Business version 1806 (Build 10228.20134).

Further investigation revealed the client sending emails was using the following keyboard characters [ :-)   :)   :/   :P ]  to create emoticons. Which appears to be a bug in the creation of the emoticons code converting them to Chinese. We have requested staff to refrain from using the following   :-)   :)   :/   :P... while communicating with clients or other staff members.