Chinese letters showing up when replying to email in Outlook

I received an email today that was sent out to our organisation. When I clicked reply in Outlook the following characters appeared on top of the other characters:

䐼噉氠湡㵧癳挠慬獳伽瑵潬歯敍獳条䡥慥敤⁲污杩㵮氢晥≴䐠剉∽呌≒‾䘼乏⁔慆散∽≃匠穩㵥㸲㰭剂‾䈼䘾⼼㹂䘠†䈼㹒㰠㹂㱓䈯‾㱤剂‾䈼吾⼼㹂嘠䈼㹒†䈼CHAR⼼㹂䨠䈼㹒†㰠䘯乏㹔㰠䐯噉㰾䥄㹖⼼䥄㹖

I had to edit one character away from the original message because I got the error from superuser:

Body cannot contain "CHAR". Unlucky.

These letters were not visible before I hit reply and it was the same for my colleagues who received it. The email is written in plain text so I can't even select "View Source" either. Has anyone experienced this before?

Opened message, note Plain Text:

Replying:

Ogglas

Posted 2016-08-18T12:32:03.250

Reputation: 920

Plain text should not be related to view source . . . – Law29 – 2016-08-18T12:45:43.070

@Law29: It is – Outlook (with its X.400ish heritage) has two separate options for viewing the message's MIME headers (under "Properties") and for viewing the raw body of a HTML message (under "View Source"). – user1686 – 2016-08-18T12:48:56.540

@Law29 I can view source in every HTML-email but not in any Plain Text-email so I actually think it is related. – Ogglas – 2016-08-18T12:50:01.043

OK, your view source means viewing the HTML part as text, not the actual mail source. @grawity has it right and has even decoded the beginning of the message (which seems to be HTML, actually). If this was spam, I wouldn't worry about it... – Law29 – 2016-08-18T12:56:55.813

A year later and this bug still appears to be present? Cross reference with https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_win10/outlook-2016-chinese-characters-appearing-in/35d2d052-e1c3-4ba3-9563-ee471efce2e6 and still no fix as of August this year

– munrobasher – 2017-10-24T21:55:41.217

Answers

For some reason, Outlook is misinterpreting the message body as UTF-16-LE while it is in fact regular ASCII-based text. (The given sample is purely ASCII, the whole message might be UTF-8.)

misdecoded:    䐼     噉     氠     湡     㵧
 (Unicode):  U+443C U+5649 U+6C20 U+6E61 U+3D67
 raw bytes:  3C 44  49 56  20 6c  61 6e  67 3d
     UTF-8:  <   D  I   V  ␣   l  a   n  g   =

The given sample decodes as:

<DIV lang=sv class=OutlookMessageHeader align="left" DIR="LTR"> <FONT Face="C" Size=2>-<BR> <B>F</B> F  <BR> <B>S</B> d<BR> <B>T</B> V<BR>  <BCHAR</B> J<BR>   </FONT> </DIV><DIV></DIV>

I don't know why Outlook uses the wrong encoding. The sender might have specified it wrongly in the Content-Type header (see message's "Properties" window); it could be that the message was prepared by an auto-mailer which confused UTF-8 and UTF-16. If Outlook and/or MS Exchange are involved, it becomes twice as difficult to figure it out.

user1686

Posted 2016-08-18T12:32:03.250

Reputation: 283 655

Based on grawity's answer I checked the header settings. This solution worked for me:

Go to File -> Advanced and look up the International Options header.

Uncheck "Use English for message headers on replies and forwards and for forward notifications."

Restart Outlook

Test reply

I work on windows 10, Outlook Version 1902 (Office 365).

Your experience may differ.

Arjan Groen

Posted 2016-08-18T12:32:03.250

Reputation: 21

You can use the iconv command to convert these chinese characters back to text:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16LE input.txt

There is an online iconv you can use to fix the text here.
Just use UTF-8 as the input and UTF-16LE as the output.

Helpful

Posted 2016-08-18T12:32:03.250

Reputation: 11