Some emails display as garbled repeated characters in Outlook for Mac

Question

Some emails display as garbled repeated characters in Outlook for Mac

jill o'Sullivan 0

Subject: Emails displaying as garbled repeated characters in Outlook for Mac (both New and Legacy)

Issue: Certain incoming emails display as unreadable, repeated characters (mostly "Ä") instead of the actual message text and formatting. This affects the message body content in the reading pane.

Account details:

Personal Gmail account (<PII removed> @gmail.com]) added to Outlook for Mac

Issue confirmed in both New Outlook and Legacy Outlook

Outlook is fully up to date

What does NOT show the issue:

The same emails display correctly when viewed directly through Gmail (web browser)

Example affected sender: [<PII removed> @topkey.io] ("Payment sent to you!" emails)

Troubleshooting already completed:

Confirmed the issue occurs in both New Outlook and Legacy Outlook, ruling out a New Outlook-specific bug

Confirmed Outlook is fully updated

Confirmed the same emails render correctly in Gmail's own web interface, which suggests the issue is specific to how Outlook is decoding/rendering these emails, not the emails themselves

Question for support: What settings or fixes are available to correct this display/encoding issue in Outlook for Mac, given that the same content renders correctly elsewhere?

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Answer 1

Please note that our forum is a public platform, and I modified your question to hide your personal information in the description. Kindly ensure that you hide any personal or organizational information the next time you post an error or other details to protect personal data.

Hi jill o'Sullivan,

Thank you for clearly describing the behavior and the checks already completed. Since the same messages display correctly in Gmail but become garbled in both versions of Outlook for Mac, this appears more consistent with how Outlook interprets the affected messages’ character encoding or MIME formatting than with a general mailbox synchronization problem.

Please note that this is a user-to-user forum, so contributors cannot inspect the original message data or access your account. However, you can try the following:

If Norton Security is installed on the Mac, update it fully and test again. A previous Outlook for Mac issue involving garbled message bodies and attachments was traced to Norton’s Vulnerability Protection module and resolved through a Norton hotfix. Characters are garbled in email body
Remove and add the Gmail account again in Outlook by selecting Outlook > Settings > Accounts, choosing the Gmail account, and using Manage > Remove Account. Then select Add Account and reconnect it. This refreshes Outlook’s locally synchronized copy without deleting messages stored in Gmail. Add a Gmail account to Outlook for Mac
If only messages from particular automated senders are affected, ask the sender to verify that the message body declares and uses UTF-8 consistently. This normally must be corrected by the sending service rather than through a recipient-side encoding setting.

Until the sending format is corrected, viewing the affected messages through Gmail in a browser is the safest workaround. If reconnecting the account does not help, report the issue through Help > Feedback in Outlook and include a sanitized affected message sample so the Outlook team can examine its encoding information.

I hope this helps identify whether the issue comes from local message processing or the affected sender’s message format.

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