My company is starting to get plagued with random intermittent blank emails in Outlook. This is suspiciously similar to the global incident from 4 months ago but NOT that.
The standard setup everyone uses is Office 365 Outlook Windows client pulling IMAP from Gmail. Everyone is up to date, no COM plugins, etc. People are literally just sending emails with vanilla settings through Gmail IMAP and sometimes they are blank in Outlook. There feels like no rhyme or reason - it happens to/from various people and wildly different intervals.
- Blank email shows up in Outlook - both reading pane and full screen. There is literally NO content. Even if you view source, view in browser, etc, everything is blank.
- BUT go to Gmail and the content is visible
- Forward the email from within Gmail and the content is viewable in Outlook in the "new" email with no problems
- Forward the original blank email from within Outlook to myself and it's just as blank as before in BOTH Outlook and Gmail
- View the email in Gmail (step 2) and do Show Original. Then do Download Original. You will get a .EML file downloaded. Open that, and it renders in Outlook perfectly visible!!
Whenever this occurs, if the original sender checks their Sent mail folder in Outlook, the original email is blank!! So they will compose an email, hit send, and then both themselves (in Sent folder) and any recipient(s) see only a blank email.
I strongly feel like the issue is content-type/encoding related somehow. I feel like it could be HTML signatures, attachments, or almost anything that is somehow causing problems but I cannot figure it out. It's some kind of weird multipart or other content-type WITHIN the email. Whenever Outlook encounters whatever it is, it is discarding the remaining email content and I thus end up with a blank email. Gmail parses the weird portion (whatever it is) and still continues to render the remaining content. When I forward the email from Gmail (step 3 above), it is resetting or reencoding everything properly and thus that's why Outlook shows it. I don't know how/why the step 5 part works because I'm downloading the original (which should be "unchanged") and then it works in Outlook.
Not sure what else I could offer up. Two identical emails sent the same way could potentially result in one being blank. I think the origin is the original sender's Outlook client but who knows. I'm super out of ideas.
Here is a snippet of one email. It WAS an HTML email but the source shows no multipart section anywhere. It is just plaintext in the raw body of the email BUT the header does have a multipart section. Is the HTML part stripped out somewhere along the way and so there's nothing to display.
Header:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_011F_01D7A494.98702380"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 16.0NO multipart in the email body, just plaintext.
------=_NextPart_000_011F_01D7A494.98702380
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
=20
Hello Team,
=20
Project =E2=80=9C050-FUL NW Library=E2=80=9D needs to be closed out.=20
=20
=201 Answer
What are the common characteristics of blank emails?
To further confirm whether the issue is only related to the Outlook client, please try to do the same test on other mailbox clients, such as Mail, and check if there're any differences.
If the same is true on mail, considering the impact of some third-party programs on your computer, please try to perform a clean boot for windows and check if the issue still occur.
If the issue only related to Outlook client, I noticed that you mentioned that it may be related to encoding. It's suggested to try to change the encoding to UTF-8 for the outgoing messages(File>Options>Advanced>Under International options) to check if there're any differences.
According to my research, the outlook client itself may be damaged. It is recommended that you try to fix the Office application or uninstall and reinstall Office to check whether the problem still exists.
In addition, according to my research, there is a thread similar to yours which mentions that the impact of DNS leads to problems. Please refer to this thread, which may be helpful to you.
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