HTML email shown as plain text in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 with question marks

The solution was a simple one - despite that it took us a whole day out on site to find it.

One of our clients was experiencing a problem with emails that he was receiving in Microsoft Outlook 2007 running on his Windows Vista Business laptop. Certain random incoming emails were arriving and had corruption when they were opened. Certain characters were being replaced with ?? (question marks). We also noticed that emails which showed the corruption were also displated as plain text (look in the title bar of the opened email and Outlook 2007 displays either plain text or html).

First efforts involved checking the settings however the majority of settings relate to sending options, you can force Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 to send emails as plain text. The other setting is under contacts a setting can be changed there to allow outlook to choose the best method to send or it can be set to plain text or rich text, great but no relevace to incoming emails.

The other thing we noticed was that the corrupted emails were also encoded using GB2312 ( simplified chinese ). The corruption was sometimes just a few characters but other times nearly the whole email consisted of ??. So we set of under the idea that it was somehow a problem related to unicode / encoding / code pages. We made a new Outlook unicode personal folders file ( .pst ) ( File -> New -> Data Folder -> choose the Outlook option, the description will state that it has extended storage capacity which means its a unicode store) and got the clients contact to send a test email - still corrupted with ?? and displayed as plain text. We lost another half a day chasing various other code page / encoding options, messing with regional settings in Windows Vista, adding language options in Outlook - still no joy.

Our next observation was that the corrupted emails were new emails sent direct to the client - forwarded emails ( FW ), replies ( RE ) and emails over a certain size were all displayed ok. We noticed that spamassassin was adding a header indicating that it had skipped some emails which all came through ok. We submitted a ticket to the clients host to enquire of the version of spamassassin that they were using. We had seen a forum posting of someone mentioning corruption under certain encodings with spamassassin but the post dated back to 2004. We also found a pdf document of a > V3 release stating that some encoding problems had been fixed. While the ticket was live with the host we continued other lines of enquiry...

We found that the problem persisted with both Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003. While the laptop was running Windows Vista Business, we had access to another laptop also running Windows Vista ( albeit Home Premuim ) which displayed all the emails perfectly with no corruption. So the plan was to compare the two. We setup the regional settings the same. Configured all the options in Outlook the same. Set the same security settings. Installed the same patches and updates. All efforts still did not fix the problem. Our last check was to compare installed programs / applications which wasn't that straight forward as one laptop was a Sony Vaio and the other was a Toshiba so there would be implicit differences anyway just from the software installed by each manufacturer. We noticed that the Google Desktop Search was installed on the Sony which suffered the problem. So we uninstalled Google Desktop Search ( the client stated he had no idea why it was installed anyway - a good indication that it wasn't used ). After a reboot we've now had several test emails all displayed correctly without corrupting question marks shown in Outlook 2007 as HTML email messages.

So if you have this or a similar problem of html incoming emails being displayed as plain text in Outlook, rather that waste a day tracking the problem check if google desktop is installed ( Control Panel -> Programs ). If it is then try uninstalling it and see if the problem is resolved. There's a chance that a new version of the Google Desktop Search wont cause the problem but as the client doesn't use it we're not going to install the latest from Google to try it, you're free to try that yourself. We think that the version installed may be out of date, the problem has persisted ever since the client got the laptop, there was an article in PC PRO recently about Sony holding its hands up over charging to ship laptops without crapware and backtracking on this charging policy. Crapware is a term coined meaning the 'applications' installed by manufacturers which are unused by those purchasing the computer equipment and more than likely unwanted by them. The crapware is installed because if the user does use it, most of the time the user has to buy a full version which generates the manufacturer further financial income.

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