A "Meet Now – Invite by Email" HTML e-mail message that is generated by Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 has unreadable text in the message body

A "Meet Now – Invite by Email" HTML e-mail message that is generated by Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 has unreadable text in the message body.

This issue occurs when you use a language version of Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 that cannot be encoded by using lower-byte ASCII (for example, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese).

This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:

• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 uses the wrong encoding for parts of the localized invitation text.
• The default outgoing encoding in Microsoft Office Outlook is not set to UTF-8.

To resolve this issue, install the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 update that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

• 969695  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969695/ ) Description of the Communicator 2007 R2 hotfix rollup package: June 2009

Then, set the default outgoing encoding in Outlook to UTF-8. To do this, follow these steps:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Mail Format tab, and then click International Options.
3. Click to select the Auto Select Encoding for outgoing messages check box, and then click OK two times.

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

The HTML text for a meeting invitation e-mail message is combined from different sources that have different encoding. For example, consider the following message segments:

• "<Your name> has invited you to an online meeting" and "Join using" are encoded by using a language specific codepage (for example, Windows 1251 for Russian).
• "If you don't have Microsoft® Office Communicator installed: Join using a Web browser" is encoded by using UTF-8.

This combination of sources and encoding with different formats results in unreadable text when you use the default Auto-Select encoding in Outlook.

After you install the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 update that is described in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 969695, all text parts are encoded in UTF-8. You have to set the default outgoing encoding in Outlook to UTF-8 to display language text correctly when you use a language that has a character set that is outside the lower-byte ASCII range.