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Why is the £ symbol showing as ? on recipients message? (Outlook classic for Windows)
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Ria Carr
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Reputation points
Why is the £ symbol showing as ? on recipients message?
Moderator note: thread updated with version of Outlook (classic Outlook for Windows)
Microsoft 365 and Office | Other
6 answers
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Stefan Blom 335.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator2026-02-18T21:34:26.0933333+00:00 Hello, thanks for your response! Unfortunately we have to use a particular font as part of our company branding. We are using Outlook Classic on a PC.
If you temporarily change the font, does that work around the problem? If it does, you may fix the problem permanently by installing an updated version of your company font.
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Stefan Blom 335.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2026-02-17T18:12:26.3133333+00:00 Try composing e-mail messages in a different font, and see if that makes a difference.
By the way, which e-mail program are you using? Outlook classic on a PC? The new Outlook? Or something else?
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Ria Carr 0 Reputation points
2026-02-18T09:39:41.2666667+00:00 Hello, thanks for your response! Unfortunately we have to use a particular font as part of our company branding. We are using Outlook Classic on a PC.
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Diana Mariz 6,315 Reputation points Independent Advisor2026-02-17T17:24:59.1166667+00:00 Hi Ria,
It looks like the £ symbol is displaying correctly on your side, so the issue is actually with the recipient’s system. When they see a question mark instead of the £ symbol, it usually means their email client or messaging app is not using an encoding that supports special characters.
To fix this, the recipient should make sure their application or device is set to UTF-8 encoding, which supports the £ symbol and other special characters. Once that is set, the symbol should display correctly for them.
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Ria Carr 0 Reputation points
2026-02-17T17:31:42.04+00:00 Unfortunately this isn't the case for us. On some emails sent from our company externally the £ displays correctly as a £, to other external companies it displays as ? which supports your statement above - suggesting the issue is not ours. However, on an email sent internally, the £ displayed as ? - which suggests we also have an issue but it is very inconsistent and therefore difficult to diagnose.
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Q&A Assist2026-02-17T16:43:34.5+00:00 AI generated content. This question contains an answer created with AI from Q&A Assist. Learn moreThe issue of the £ symbol displaying as a question mark (?) in recipients' messages typically arises from character encoding problems. This can occur when the email client or server does not properly handle non-ASCII characters, such as the pound sign.
One common cause is that the mail client application may be using a legacy version of the Microsoft .NET Framework, which does not correctly handle non-ASCII characters in the subject line or body of the email. If the email is sent using the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class, it may send raw UTF-8 bytes instead of using the standard header encoding, leading to garbled characters.
To resolve this, ensure that the email client is updated to a version that properly supports UTF-8 encoding and check the encoding settings for the messages being sent. Additionally, adjusting the character sets used in messages can help prevent this issue from occurring in the future.