Weird characters in email body

Question

I have a little problem with VBScript. There is how it should work. It is a simply code that should go through all emails in particular folder, get particular email body and try to find regular expression. It works correctly on my computer but somehow the same code is not working on other laptop (my friend laptop). Most (not all of them) of emails body look very weird like on attached screen below:

I would like to add that we had the same email messages to test. What is also curious, after use script, it converts first email into these weird characters. And this is how code looks:

Set objOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set objMailbox = objNamespace.Folders(Main_mailbox)
Set objMainMailbox = objMailbox.Folders(Main_folder)
Set objFolder = objMainMailbox.Folders(Sub_folder)
Set re = New RegExp
re.IgnoreCase = True
re.Global = True
re.Pattern = "<.+>"

Set colItems = objFolder.Items

NumberOfEmails = colItems.Count
WScript.Echo NumberOfEmails & " emails found"
For i = NumberOfEmails To 1 Step - 1
    BodyMsg = colItems(i).Body
    Lines = Split(BodyMsg, vbCrlf)
    For j = 1 To UBound(Lines)
        If InStr(1, Lines(j), "Reply-To:") Then
            Set RegMatches = re.Execute(Lines(j))
            For Each myMatch In RegMatches
                OutputMatch = OutputMatch & " " & myMatch & ";"
                OutputMatch = Replace(OutputMatch, "<", "", 1, 1)
                OutputMatch = Replace(OutputMatch, ">", "", 1, 1)
                EmailCount = EmailCount + 1
            Next
        End If
    Next
Next

I am wondering if it is about encoding or something like that and if that problem is caused by system settings?

If you need some more information that I forgot mention about, please let me know.

Answer 1

That sure sounds like you are running into an NDR (Non-Delivery Report - represented by the ReportItem object) - ReportItem.Body returns gibberish when accessed though the Outlook Object Model. This has been a problem for a few versions of Outlook now.

You can either skip items like this by checking that you only get the MailItem object (Class property must be 43 (olMail)) or use Redemption (I am its author) - its RDOReportItem object does not have this problem.