Why is the £ symbol showing as a ? on recipients message?

Question

A similar thread suggested "Your administrator can enforce UTF‑8 by updating the remote domain settings in the Exchange Admin Center". When this is updated to UTF-8 some of recipients get an unreadable message.

:p+AD4APA-/o:p+AD4APA-/span+AD4APA-/p+AD4- +ADw-p class+AD0AIg-MsoNormal+ACI- style+AD0AIg-margin-right:0cm+ACIAPgA8-span style+AD0AIg-font-ACY-quot+ADs-Aptos+ACY-quot+ADs-,sans-serif+ACIAPg-+ADw-o:p+AD4APA-/o:p+AD4APA-/span+AD4APA-/p+AD4- +ADw-p class+AD0AIg-MsoNormal+ACI-

Answer 1

Hi @Sarah Hall

Thank you for posting your question in Microsoft Q&A. 

Based on my research, this issue might occur when the character encoding used by the sender and the recipient does not match. The £ symbol is not part of the standard ASCII character set, so if the email is encoded incorrectly, this character can appear as “?” or become corrupted. 

Regarding the unreadable text some recipients receive (for example: :p+AD4APA-/o:p+AD4APA-/span+AD4APA-/p+AD4-), this typically happens due to an encoding mismatch. UTF‑8 is the modern standard; however, some older mail servers, devices, or email applications may not fully support UTF‑8. When these systems fail to decode the message correctly, the text may appear as Base64/Quoted‑Printable sequences instead of readable content. 

I have found a relevant article that might help, you could refer via: Receiving scrambled emails - Software & Applications - Spiceworks Community 

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. These sites are not controlled by Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please ensure that you fully understand the risks before using any suggestions from the above link. 

If possible, could you please contact your recipient to verify which character encoding they are currently using on their side, as well as which mail application they are using? I have met a relevant discussions indicating that this issue, where certain symbols appear as a “?”, can depend on the encoding used on the recipient’s side, and that the Classic Outlook version (19628.20150) may also be affected. 

You can refer via: question marks instead of quotation marks in Outlook after upgrading to version 19628.20150 - Micro… 

I hope this helps. 

Please understand that our initial reply may not always immediately resolve the issue. However, with your help and more detailed information, we can work together to find a solution. 

---

Note: Please follow the steps in [our documentation] to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread. 

Answer 2

The issue of the £ symbol displaying as a question mark (?) in recipients' messages is often related to character encoding problems. This can occur if the email client or server does not properly handle the character set used in the email. Specifically, if the email is sent using a legacy mail client that does not support UTF-8 encoding, non-ASCII characters like the £ symbol may not be displayed correctly.

When you enforce UTF-8 encoding by updating the remote domain settings in the Exchange Admin Center, it is intended to improve compatibility with various character sets. However, if some recipients are still seeing unreadable messages, it may indicate that their email clients do not support UTF-8 or are not configured to handle it properly.

To resolve this issue, ensure that both the sending and receiving email clients are configured to support UTF-8. Additionally, you may want to check the character set settings in the Exchange Admin Center to ensure they are correctly set for all remote domains.

---

References:

• Supported character sets for remote domains in Exchange Online
• Unreadable characters in the subject line of received email messages