Outlook hangs when accesing japanese charaters

[Ovidiu]

Almost every time I receive emails that contain japanese character Outlook
jams.
I need to open myself the account on the mail server and delete the
problematic email. I am using pop3 method. After that I restart Outlook and
is just fine.
What is going on ?Why is this happening only for japanese characters .
Is there a special setting for that? I must mention that Outlook express
does not put me in this situations. only Outlook 2003.
thank you

 

[Pat Willener]

Do you have Japanese language support installed? If not, Outlook may be
looking for Japanese language support, which could hang it - temporarily
or permanently.

My Outlook 2003 receives Japanese messages on a daily bases, and I have
never seen any delay.

 

[Ovidiu]

Yes, the japanese support is installed.
This problem happens only to some japanese emails not tot all of them.
Any ideas what to do ? thanks

 

[Pat Willener]

Now it becomes more interesting. What distinguishes these "some" emails
from others? Of course, if you can never open them, it will be very
difficult to tell.

Can you try to save them to a folder, then analyze them with a program
like FileAlyzer? (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/filealyzer/index.html)

Do they use an unusual encoding (instead of ISO-2022-JP)?
What message type are they (HTML, RTF, Plain Text)?
Anything else unusual about them?

 

[Ovidiu]

I am admin for 10 pc's. All of them accesing the email server using POP3.
Most of the emails that contain japanese letters are working just fine.
Some of them, I cannot tell why some of them, start downloading but
immediately outllok hangs and the user has to force shutdown of outllok using
task manger.
If the user opens again outlook then the message is downloaded again and it
hangs. Until I manually delete the troublesome email directly from the server
the user cannot use outlook.
I've tried using other 3rd party email client and it does not happen. I do
not want 3rd party email cleint. I want outlook because all the functions.
This problem happens to all of the users that receive the email.
It happens for POP3 and not for IMAP.
Thank you

 

[Pat Willener]

It's a problem I have never heard about. I have been using Outlook in a
Japanese environment for more than 10 years, and this has never happened
for any user. (But we do use Exchange Server, not POP/SMTP).

Can you try to obtain one of the malfunctioning messages, and see what
difference there is from "normal" Japanese messages? What is the
encoding (ISO-2022-JP?); what is the message type (plain text, HTML,
RTF?); what is the font - perhaps a font that isn't installed on your
site? Are these messages unusually long, or contain attachments?

 

[Ovidiu]

Today it happened again. This email contained an attache with an unreadable
name (strange sign and letters).The encoding is ISO-2022.
here is some from the header:
""Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:39:35 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0241_01C85C4C.34C5D770"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3138
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198
X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV version 0.92, clamav-milter version 0.92 on
xx.xx.xx.xx
X-Virus-Status: Clean
""
I have checked this email with 3rd party email client> It works no problem.

Any ideas ?

Thanks

 

[Ovidiu]

Also I have forwarded the email using the 3rd party email client to another
email account from the company and I jammed that account's outlook also.

 

[Pat Willener]

Did you forward the attachment as well? If so, does it also happen if
you forward the message without the attachment?

Can you also try to forward the message with a corrected encoding of
ISO-2022-JP, or even ISO-2022-JP-2004 (ISO-2022 is not a valid encoding
to my understanding).

 

[Ovidiu]

I have tried as you suggested without the attache.
It works .
I did nothing to the encoding.
So the attache is the problem from the beginning.
Waiting for your reply.
Thank you

 

[Pat Willener]

Can I assume that the strange name of the attachment was originally
Japanese, then in the process of the mail transfer changed into "mojibake"?

If this is the case, then I assume that Outlook is unable to save that
attachment. But I wouldn't know how to fix that.

I often receive mail with attachments that have Japanese names, and that
are not turned into "mojibake"; these download fine.

Do you have the latest fixes and service packs applied to Outlook 2003?

 

[Ovidiu]

Dear Pat,
Your assuming is right. Yesterday I had access to one of the laptops that
sends this emails. Your are perfectly right: the attache's name is readable
on the laptop and finally it becomes mojibake and yes outlook cannot save the
attache.
Still strangly after forcing outlook to shut down and open it again I can
find the email problem and the attache downloaded but immediately on
send/receive it tries to download again the same email and again it jams.
As you said most of the emails with attache (japanese) work just fine but
others don't.
I have applied SP3 for Outlook long time ago.
Therefore the problem relies in the core of Outlook. Am I right? By the way
: Outlook Express works fine with those emails.
I am thinking more and more to switch from outlook to 3rd party with the
same functionalities (calendar , tasks etc). unless of course bill gates
returns and fixes the problem (joke).
Still waiting for some helpfull reply from all of you.
And Pat ! Thank you very much for your help.
Thank you for confirming what I though from the beginning (Outlook is the
problem). I needed that for my boss who doesn't believe in these things.

 

[Pat Willener]

Thanks for the confirmations. I have one more question, and this may
hold the solution for your problem. Does Outlook run in Unicode mode?
See this article for more information on Unicode mode

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ork2003/HA011402611033.aspx

 

[Ovidiu]

I have already read that article and lots of others. I am not running
Exchange Server.
It is an Squirell email server configured for POP3.
But I am trying something else. I set in the Outlook Express (the user that
gives these troubles), in the Options-Send tab-International Setting-send
everything using unicode 8 and use English headers. Until now nothing wrong
happen. I'll keep you posted.
thanks

 

[Ovidiu]

So bad things happen, Still outlook jams .

I have already read that article and lots of others. I am not running
Exchange Server.
It is an Squirell email server configured for POP3.
But I am trying something else. I set in the Outlook Express (the user that
gives these troubles), in the Options-Send tab-International Setting-send
everything using unicode 8 and use English headers. Until now nothing wrong
happen. I'll keep you posted.
thanks

 

[Pat Willener]

Unicode mode is also supported with POP3 accounts; see

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ork2003/HA011402301033.aspx