Non-English characters in the subject of an e-mail message are replaced with question marks when the message is received in Outlook 2003 in an Exchange 2007 organization

Consider the following scenario. In a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 organization, you send an e-mail message that contains non-English characters in the subject to a Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 user. For example, the Subject box of the message contains German characters or Chinese characters. Additionally, the Outlook 2003 user has Out of Office replies enabled. In this scenario, the non-English characters in the subject of the Out of Office message that you receive are replaced with question marks (?).

For example, the subject of the original message reads as follows:However, the subject of the Out of Office message that you receive reads as follows:

This problem occurs because the Outlook 2003 Out of Office messages template is not handled correctly in UTF-8. This causes the non-English charters to be replaced with question marks.

To resolve this problem, install Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007. For more information about Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007, see the following Exchange Help topic: For more information about how to install the latest Exchange service pack or update rollup, see the following Exchange Help topic:

To work around this problem, use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to read e-mail messages.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For more information about software update terminology, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information the naming schema for Exchange Server software updates, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: