Outlook 2013 adding random exclamation marks to message

Hi Neil,

I would need more details to assist you:

How is the email account setup on Outlook (POP3/IMAP/MAPI or Exchange Server)?

Does this issue occur when you have email conversations with specific email domain?

You may open Outlook in its application safe doing the following:

Click Start, go to Programs, go to Accessories, click Run, type Outlook /safe (note there is a space between Outlook and /).

If the application works fine safe mode, try disabling the add ins for the application and check the result,

• Click the File tab.
• Go to Options.
• Click Add-ins.
• Clear all the options. 

Let us know the details and results.

Hi Neil,

Thank you for the reply.

I would like to know if there are any security program installed on the computer.

If so, you may disable the e-mail scanner from within the security application and check if the issue occurs.

You may also restart the computer in Windows Clean boot following the steps from the link below and check if the issue persists:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Note: Ensure you restart the computer in normal mode after troubleshooting.

If the issue persists, then you may create new Outlook profile following Method 1 only from the following article, setup the email account and check if this issue occur:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2752583

To setup an email account, refer the steps from the link below:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-an-email-account-HA102809480.aspx

Let us know the details and results for further assistance.

We have a database app that emailed a daily summary, as a big one-line blob of HTML.

We saw the spurious '!' insertions in Outlook.  They were not being sent by the app.

I clicked on Outlook’s “If there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a web browser”, then in the browser right-clicked “View Source”, and I found that two spurious “!\n ” had been inserted:

<th style="text-align:rig!

 ht;"><a>Sites</a></th><th style="text-align:left;"><a>Last No!

 te</a>

This spurious "!\n " insertion happened around charactet 2039 of the single long line of HTML.

The spurious insertion does not occur if I run the HTML through a formatter which indents and inserts line breaks between HTML elements.

I hypothesize that the Outlook preview browser has a buffering problem in its parser.

On the off chance this is an issue for others....

I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure this out but never did.  Thankfully, this is no longer a problem for us.  We changed our email system and the problem went away.  This is something we had planned to do anyway, it wasn't a case of using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.

I cannot prove but suspect it was a combination of our old email server (Icewarp) and Outlook 2013 upwards.  In the time between me initially posting this question and changing our email system (around 3 years) the problem became more frequent as we upgraded more clients to Outlook 2013/2016.  It wasn't an issue for 2010 users.  But at the same time, it wasn't an issue using Outlook 2010 with something like Gmail.

We still have a mixture of versions of Outlook in use from 2010 to 2016.  We are now using Exchange Online and no longer have this issue.