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Outlook sending asian

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by mne

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This is a problem popping up everywhere. We first discovered it on our own system, where sending emails from Outlook 2003 would send in asian characters rather than english. When composing the email everything is fine, in our sent items folder its all asian, the recipients are receiving it with all question marks (?). I thought this might just be our problem, but then a day later one of my clients called with the same problem, then another customer came into our shop with the same problem. We are running Office 2003 on Windows XP, my first client is running Office 2007 on Vista Business and the new customer is running Office 2003 on Windows XP. I have checked all regional and language settings in Office and Windows on all machines.

I am at a loss and from what I am seeing it is a growing problem.

13 replies

by thumbsup2

.... who is the one with the infection, spreading it around the network and to your customers?

Have you run a full system scan in Safe Mode lately? Well, you better. You're infected.

by mne

We have been scanning our own systems and come up with nothing so far. Used Spybot S&D, Malware Bytes, Adaware, Bullguard, all updated.
Any other programs you can suggest to clean out this "infection"

by mne

My customers computers have not been in contact with ours, either directly on the network or via email. We don't correspond to each other via email.

by mne

Ran all scans, fully updated and in safe mode. A few tracking cookies and such but no serious problems, cleaned what was there out. Problem still exists, and the problem only exists on one of our computers, the others in the workshop with the same job role work just fine. Same goes for one of my clients, works in an office with several others, everyone else is fine, but his PC send in ?????? question marks. Another thing to note is, its not a perrmanent problem it is intermittent, but seems to be getting worse as time goes on. It used to happen rarely now its happening more and more frequently. On our end it happens all the time, but my clients so far is only happening 50% of the time.

Still looking for ideas if there is anyone else who has dealt with it before or can offer suggestions.

by mne

Ok, so i've worked this out so far:
Its any plain text email that gets sent as asian/question marks, if i change to html before sending, it works fine. Tested this sending straight from outlook and from within quickbooks, plain text is gibberish, html perfect english. From the googling i've done it seems to point to encoding problem, i've checked the encoding options on this machine against other machines in our workshop and they seem to match. Haven't tested all this out on my customers computers yet. Want to see if i can get plain text working before i do.

Any ideas on that?

by seanferd

Perhaps something is indicating to Outlook that the wrong encoding should be used.

Switch Autoselct off and try a regular English character set.

by mne

Autoselect was on, i turned it off and the same problem is still there. The encoding is set to Western European (ISO) sames as my other machines.

by mne

I checked that link out, neither myself or my customers are using or sending to an exchange mailbox. Also the HTML emails are working, its the plain text thats coming out wrong.

by mne

Thanks Jacky, turns out it was Bullguard's spamfilter stuffing up the plain text emails. Simply turning spamfilter off fixed everything. I've spoken to Bullguard about it and they are aware of the problem and their development team is working on it blah blah blah. We'll see how long it takes them to fix it.

by rob miners

but I really hope that you get it sorted sooner than later. ;)

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