3 steps to correct message encoding in emails

Problem:

Regional characters (such as ü, ä, ø, etc.) in signatures and disclaimers added by CodeTwo Exchange Rules are not displayed correctly. Instead of the actual characters, users see strings of ? signs.

Solution:

This issue is most likely caused by incorrect encoding settings. For example, the proper display of European regional characters requires the UTF-8 encoding protocol (Central European). If the encoding in your environment is set, for example to ASCII, the regional characters will not be displayed correctly. 

If ? appears instead of a regional character, force the correct encoding settings in:

1. Windows Server
2. MS Outlook
3. Outlook on the web (only in hybrid deployments with on-premises Exchange server)

If none of the solutions above helps, you can try a workaround to the encoding issue and use the Force email format action (available only in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro). This will allow you to automatically convert all plain text emails to HTML. Since the encoding issue is almost exclusive to TXT-formatted messages, the problem should be solved. All regional characters will be correctly displayed, regardless of the encoding settings.