email subject's font was changed to Chinese

[Robert]

email subject's font got changed to Chinese when recipient replied.
This has happened with 2 different users and different recipients on 3
separate occasions.
We have Exchange 2003 SP2 and Outlook 2003 SP2.
I tracked the message in Exchange and the subject was still in English
before it left our environment - "Congrats on the Deserved Press" and when
the recipient replied the subject changed to "RE: 潃æ®æ…²ç´æ¼ â®æ¡´â¥æ•„敳癲摥倠敲ç³" - If
anyone has any clue as to what is causing this please let me know.

 

[Robert]

Interesting - I copied 潃æ®æ…²ç´æ¼ â®æ¡´â¥æ•„æ•³ç™²æ‘¥å€ æ•²ç³ and pasted into Word. The font is
"Simsun" which is not one of my installed fonts and it cannot be changed to
any other font.

 

[Pat Willener]

Does the Subject header line any encoding in it in (your) sent message,
like 'Subject: =?utf-8?B?U3BhbTpTcGFtOkhvbmVzdCBEZWFm?=' ?

Does it have any encoding in the received reply?

 

[Robert]

Hello Pat, Thanks for your reply. I don't have access to the recipient's
email but this is part of the header from the recipients reply message...
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5
Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C6693C.A55B2CB4"
Subject:
=?utf-8?B?UkU6IOa9g+adruaFsueNtOa8oOKBruahtOKBpeaVhOaVs+eZsuaRpeWAoA==?=
=?utf-8?B?5pWy542z?=

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

[Pat Willener]

If your original outgoing message did not contain anything UTF-8 in the
Subject line, then the phenomenon must be happening at the recipients
side - either client or server. What this could be I can only guess.

On my company's server side we have some new anti-virus system that also
seemingly tags certain messages with a prefix 'Spam:Spam:' in the
Subject line. At the same time it encodes the whole Subject line to
UTF-8, but I don't know why.

Something similar could be at play here in your situation; this is my
only guess.

 

[Robert]

That was my thought. (that it was happening on the recipients side) That's
strange abount your Anti-Virus but could explain the phenomenon. I found
little or no info on the Internet concerning this so at least now I have
something to go by. Thanks again for your reply.

 

[Robert]

I have still been searching for an answer to this phenomenon. The problem
cropped up again for the user and started happening with every email that he
sent to his wife's mindspring account. I was able to obtain the internet
headers from her email. The subject was getting changed / encoded on its way
to her. I came accross a post by CS with a Subject of "English email message
becomes Chinese message".
We too are using a mail disclaimer software although it is a different
software package. I checked the release notes for a more resent version and
one of the fixes are "The subject line of some messages was displayed
incorrectly". I have updated our software and I'm hopeful that this will fix
the "phenomenon". I'm perplexed as to why email disclaimer software would
have anything to do with an email's subject!?!?
I'll post a follow up.

 

[Robert]

We have not experienced this issue since applying the update to MailDisclaimer.