Recently I've noticed that when I send email to Office 365 group from my iPhone (iOS) standard Mail application and people respond to it they get Chinese characters in them. This is visible in place of:
—–Original Message—–
From: Przemysław Kłys
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2017 9:01 AM
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: <standard topic>
After further testing the issue seems to be related to all emails sent to Office 365 groups as plain text. Not only to iOS emails.
Problem Description
In standard email when people respond it usually contains information with fields like From, Sent, To and Subject.
However what I've noticed is that if email is sent as Plain Text it's actually totally scrambled as below using Chinese characters
In text it looks something like this which is very weird
䐼噉氠湡㵧汰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‾䈼䘾⼼㹂倠†䈼㹒㰠㹂㱓䈯‾㱔剂‾䈼吾⼼㹂䄠䈼㹒†䈼匾⼼㹂䄠䈼㹒†㰠䘯乏㹔㰠䐯噉㰾䥄㹖⼼䥄㹖
This only happens when the message is sent to a an Office 365 group, and only if sent as plain text. It doesn't appear on RTF or HTML formatted messages. When I've checked what that actually means there was no direct translation from Chinese to English
For Chinese to Polish it gives a bit different meaning but it totally makes no sense so I guess it's just bug on translation.
At one point when I checked the translation the text claimed to be more like Viagra selling solutions. Fortunately it seems that the translation from Chinese to Polish/English is just not good enough. To be honest I am assuming those are Chinese characters because I actually can't read them. Those can be totally made up signs as far as I know.
Notes
I've contacted Microsoft Online Services and they have confirmed the issue on their side. Microsoft internal team is working on it however there is no information when the issue will be fixed.
The only workarounds are:
Do not use Plain Text
Use HTML or RTF instead
Microsoft actually pointed me to User Voice Feedback page which basically means it may take a while to get a fix for that. Hopefully it will get there sooner than later.