Emails with incorrect encoding

Question

Hello. Exchange 2016 on-premise. Are there any mechanisms that can understand the reason why an incorrectly encoded message arrives ?

My text turns into ������� � ������������ ������, �� ���������� ������ � ��������, �������� � ������ � ������ ��

Answer 1

Hi @Андрей Михалевский,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A platform!

According to your description, you are currently experiencing a problem with incorrect email encoding.

In Exchange 2016, incorrectly encoded messages can be the result of several factors like incorrect character sets being used, corruption during transmission, or misconfiguration at the sender's email server. There are some steps you can take to understand and potentially resolve this issue:

1. Check Message Tracking Logs:
   • Open the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) on your Exchange server.
   • Use the Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet to find the problematic email. You can filter by sender, recipient, subject, etc. For example:

      Get-MessageTrackingLog -Recipients "[recipient's email]" -Start "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM" -End "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM"
   

   • Look for any events related to the email that might indicate where the issue occurred.
2. Examine the Email Headers:
   • Open the email with the encoding issue in your email client.
   • Find the option to view the email's headers. This varies between clients; in Outlook, you can do this by going to File > Properties and looking in the "Internet headers" box.
   • Look for the Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding headers. The Content-Type header should specify the charset, for example, charset="utf-8". Ensure that your server is capable of interpreting this charset.
3. Check Your Receive Connectors:
   • Open the Exchange Admin Center (EAC).
   • Navigate to Mail Flow > Receive Connectors.
   • Select the receive connector handling incoming mail and click Edit.
   • Check the settings under Security and Scoping to make sure they are not misconfigured.
4. Verify Sender's Email Server Configuration (if possible): Contact the sender or the sender's IT support and ask them to ensure that their email server is correctly configured to use the appropriate charset.
5. Inspect Anti-Spam or Anti-Virus Filters:
   • Access the settings of your security applications to ensure they are not modifying the email's content or encoding.
   • If necessary, disable the filter temporarily to test if it is causing the issue.
6. Check Email Client Settings:
   • In your email client, go to the settings that control how messages are displayed.
   • Look for a section related to reading or displaying messages and ensure it's set to automatically select the correct character set for displaying messages.
   • If messages are consistently displayed incorrectly, try setting the character set manually to the one you know is correct (like UTF-8).

If these steps do not provide insight, you may need to analyze the raw message source if you have access to it. Look for any anomalies in how the text is encoded compared to other messages that are displayed correctly.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any queries.

Best,

Jake Zhang