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Outlook Signatures for customer start to corrupt umlauts and tabulators (probably other special Characters as well)

Anonymous
2025-03-21T08:57:27+00:00

Last Week a Customer called, because all their signatures were corrupted. All German Umlauts (äöü) were Turned into different Characters, that looked like an encoding issue.

For example

"Freundliche Grüsse"

Turns into:

"Freundliche Grüsse"

"Vielen Dank für die Bestellung"

Turns into:

"Vielen Dank für die Bestellung"

And the Tabulators Turn into ÂÂÂÂ

For Example:

"Hauptwahl: [TAB] 0041 234 56 78"

Turns Into:

"Hauptwahl: [TAB] ÂÂÂÂ0041 234 56 78"

I was unable to determine the cause. Ultimately i told the customer to fix the Signatures by deleting the characters and add the german umlauts again.

The signatures held for an entire week before it happened again yesterday.

And now a second customer has called with the same issue.

Both are on separate Office365 Platform.

It only seems to happen with signatures that are cloud synched.

It doesn't happen to all Users, some users still have their umlauts in their e-mail while others have basically the same signature but now corrupted.

The upload for images somehow is failing, i have 8 Examples of what is happening so i uploaded them to one of our servers.

The Images are heavily censored to make sure we do not post any personal infos.

https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/1.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/2.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/3.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/4.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/5.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/6.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/7.png https://module.si-solutions.ch/downloads/ms/8.png

For now i turned off cloud sync for the signatures and told the customer to recreate them locally, But that is a hassle and makes the customers angry.

Some have 20+ Special Signatures that now are all corrupted and need to be fixed.

Anybody else experiencing this?

I'm at a loss where this could come from.

Sincerely

Fabian Zünd

SI-Solutions GmbH

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-17T15:10:22+00:00

    Hi all,

    There was a bug escalated to the Outlook Team for this issue, and it should now be resolved.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-09T13:05:19+00:00

    Hello everyone,

    we are experiencing the same issue since a few days. We also tried to turn off cloud sync by setting this on Outlook, but also here we saw that the signatures were corrupted after a while.

    The only workaround that worked for us is the following:

    1. Delete all signatures in Outlook (Desktop App) and delete all under the folder %appdata%\Microsoft\Signatures
    2. Go to OWA (outlook.com) and correct the signatures there.
    3. Let it synchronize and never touch the signatures from Outlook (Desktop App) until Microsoft provides a solution for this.

    We are also waiting for a solution by Microsoft to clean up this mess.

    Hope this helps you.

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2025-03-26T11:30:45+00:00

    Same problem over here, super anoying, already found a solution?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2025-03-25T11:03:59+00:00

    We have the same here... multiple users' e-mail signatures have suddenly become corrupted - for example: -

    • becomes –

    ' becomes ’

    We have had the same e-mail signatures for over a year, this has only just started happening in the last few days. What is the fix, please?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2025-03-25T09:41:56+00:00

    The same here. Happens since Saturday 22.03. We had no problems before.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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