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Skyhawk
Asked: 2012-04-19 13:27:15 +0800 CST

Outlook 2011 client, Exchange 2010 server; letters missing in text of sent items

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On a Mac client running Outlook 2011 connected to an Exchange 2010 server: all of a sudden, characters are getting dropped in outbound e-mail messages. The client machine has been rebooted and this is still recurring with every message sent.

Does anyone have any idea what would cause this? Feels like a throwback to BBS days.

Test message as appears in Sent Items, and as received by addressees:

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Screenshot taken prior to clicking Send:

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mac-osx exchange-2010 outlook-2011

3 Answers

  1. This question is old, but still appears on the first page of "unanswered," so I wanted to add a few points.

    • it isn't clear if this is an issue with message content or rendering
    • To determine which is the issue, in the folder's message list, command-click on the message and select "view source" from the context menu.
      • This will open the email as sent in textpad, from where you may be able to see if the content is correct.
      • If you cannot tell if non-printable characters are present, save a copy of the message source to a text file:
      • Choose File > Duplicate, choose File > Save, type a name, choose where you want to save the document, and then click Save.
      • In a terminal window run "od -tc my_mail_message.txt | less"
      • you'll probably see a confused mess of different line endings, with both 012 and 015 appearing individually.
    • if it is a font issue, then viewing in plain text should resolve that. If it doesn't, it isn't a font issue, though it could mean that character is not printable in the default display font.
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  2. I experienced this issue recently and this was one of the only threads available on the issue so I wanted to add my comments.

    I also found this article, which hints that Outlook 2011 doesn't like when emails are encoded with "Windows-1252".

    The email I saw this issue with was in fact encoded in Windows-1252. What was strange was the e-mail source was also missing the letters, even though the preview was fine.

    Nothing I did really fixed it, and my only recommendation to the user was to use Entourage to reply to this message and re-iterate that it is only a one-off issue from this particular use with certain email settings.

    Very strange though!

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  3. here some insights:

    Manually setting the Text Encoding to UTF-8 (Format -> Text Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) does indeed "fix" the problem.

    But: until today: Unable to set preferred encoding for outbound messages in Outlook 2011 - Microsoft Answers

    Char encoding of emails is changing - Microsoft Answers In reply to Robert P. post on May 8, 2012 Hi and thanks for the reply,

    I have 3 accounts set in Outlook (2 IPAM and 1 POP) and I never had any error messages or font issues apart form the following:

    Before this upgrade I had (and still have) the known issue regarding the 7-bit character set when the format encoding is set to AUTO.  For example, if you use Greek or other characters outside the 7-bit (russian, etc) and you send it with the encoding set to AUTO (default), then it will not use UTF-8 (or Greek ISO) but another encoding (windows-1254) which results wrong format and an unreadable content. You have to specifically set it to UTF-8 every single time you email (there is no default permanent set) or use a quick workaround to include a character (in the signature) outside the 7-bit (like the euro symbol) and this way you force the AUTO format encoding to use UTF-8.

    The above is while sending and the workaround is ok, but the same has appeared after the upgrade when you receive an email and there is no control. so:

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