Microsoft Outlook displays wrong characters (mostly Chinese) when replying or forwarding emails
Issue
When you reply to an email, or forward it, you see some wrong characgers in the editing area.
Possible solutions
This is mostly due to Outlook messing up with the character encoding of the original message.
Change replying encoding
For Outlook 2007 clients
- In the Outlook client, click Tools, and then click Options.
- Click the Mail Format tab.
- In the Message format section, click International Options. In the Encoding Options section, select Unicode (UTF-8) in the Preferred encoding for outgoing message list.
For Outlook 2010/2013/2016 clients
- In the Outlook client, click File, and then click Options.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- In International options section, select Unicode (UTF-8) in the Preferred encoding for outgoing message list.
Disable English for message headers
- Go to File -> Options -> 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
Convert the characters
Should you have an email with such issue, you could convert encoding to review the message content.
This can be done using iconv library
Download for Windows : http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libiconv.htm
The tool should be available for your favorite GNU\Linux distros and also on MacOS.
Download, extract the files, open a command prompt, go the the directory and type in the following command.
iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16LE input.txt
Where input.txt is the file location you’ve copied the email content you want to convert.
Sources
https://superuser.com/questions/1114966/chinese-letters-showing-up-when-replying-to-email-in-outlook