Outlook 365 vs Professional [save mailitem] Encoding Issues

Question

I have an outlook addin currently in development that reads mail properties from outlook and displays on a winform.

I built the outlook on an environment with outlook professional 2013. All functionalities are good. Properties like, sendername, from, to etc..gets readably displayed on a winform.

This is how i access the properties of a mail.

Outlook.MailItem mail;
mail.Sender.Name;

Now, If i take the addin on an environment with the same system locale but different outlook (Outlook 365)

I experience decoding issues when trying to read some particular mails. So for example if i am accessing a mail from sender : Adèle

Outlook.MailItem mail;
mail.Sender.Name; // ---> This returns Ad?le

The mail has a UTF-8 encoding when i checked with outlook spy. The PC locales are the same.

One weird thing is, I copied the mail from the outlook 365 environment to the other (outlook professional) and have the issue, but when i copy the mail and import from the outlook professional environment to the outlook 365, it works correctly. So i think this has to do with the way outlook 365 saves or represents it's objects ? How can i approach this issue ? Is it fixable on my end ?

Answer 1

Outlook Object Model (just like all IDispatch-friendly COM libraries) returns strings in the UTF-16 (2 bytes) encoding.

Make sure you display strings in a way that does not convert strings to a single byte encoding.

Do you see the same problem in OutlookSpy (I am its author)?