Can't receive regular Community newsletter

Question

Hi - using Win 11 and Outlook classic:

When I click on the heading I get a very quick look at the contents and immediately they disappear (in the preview window). If I click on "view in browser", it take me to an "Internet Explorer" window which just has jibberish.

Any ideas??

Alexandru_BD · Answer

You are most welcome. I will look deeper into this, but as far as I can tell right now, the emails are coming through just fine, hence my assumption that something happens locally on that device..

Anyway, glad to hear you've managed to find a way to read our email digest. 👍️

dbscanlan · Answer

Thanks very much for your detailed response.

In answer to your first question: No, it only happens with these emails from Bitdefender. However, I tried all you suggestions (up to and including the Bitdefender programme suggestions but with no success.

I have solved the problem, in some way, by successfully reading the email directly from "Gmail" online (Microsoft Edge). I'm happy to do that in future.

Thanks again for your help

Alexandru_BD · Answer

Hi,

Does this happen with other emails as well, from other senders? I'm asking because we can see that the community notifications are being sent successfully, and the emails are displayed accurately on the devices where this was tested. Thus, I think this points much more to a local Outlook rendering issue rather than a sending problem..

For the record, that error message usually appears when Outlook cannot properly render the HTML body of the email on that machine. This could happen for various reasons, it could be a cache issue, so the message body may be corrupt in the local cache, or Outlook’s preview engine is misbehaving somehow. Or, it could be an add-on, a security tool, PDF/HTML handler, or accessibility plug-in that may interfere with how Outlook displays HTML messages.

Also, a damaged Outlook profile, OST file, or office component can sometimes cause preview-only display failures.

Another possible cause could be hardware acceleration or graphics driver issues. So this needs a bit of fiddling on your side to find out the actual cause. These are steps which cannot be done by the sender, so if you have the time, I can provide you with a few instructions you can follow in order to get to the bottom of this.

For clarity, the view in browser action opening a broken Internet Explorer page is secondary. That feature is old and not reliable on modern systems. It does not necessarily mean the email itself is bad.

Now, if the emails were being sent incorrectly, you would generally expect the issue to reproduce on other devices or mail clients too. Since another computer can read the same messages normally, this means that the sender format is acceptable, and the problem is likely tied to the affected Outlook installation or Windows user profile. I say this because like I mentioned earlier, I couldn't reproduce this issue on other devices. And I'm also using Outlook, btw.

I think you can start by testing Outlook in safe mode. This basically helps rule out any add-ins. So, press Win + R, then run outlook.exe /safe, then open one of the affected emails. If the emails display normally in Safe Mode, an add-in is the likely cause. Then you can disable add-ins one by one from File → Options → Add-ins → COM Add-ins → Go.

The second troublesooting step would be to disable hardware graphics acceleration. This can be done in Outlook, and here's the path: File → Options → Advanced → Display → Disable hardware graphics acceleration. After doing that, simply restart Outlook and test again to see if the emails are displayed correctly.

Moving on to the next step, turn off the reading pane and open the message fully, so double-click to open the email in its own window from the list, not the reading window where this error occurs. The idea is that if it fails only in preview, the issue is specifically tied to the preview pane. Let me know if you understand what I mean here.

Furthermore, check whether only HTML emails are affected. Check plain text email, so any emails in your inbox that don't have embedded content or anything else other than text. If only HTML or the emails received from the community fail, that further supports an HTML rendering problem.

Next, rebuild the Outlook local cache. To do this, close Outlook then create a new Outlook profile first, or rebuild the OST if appropriate. The safer approach would be to go to Control Panel → Mail → Show Profiles. Create a new profile and open Outlook with the new profile and test the same emails. If the issue disappears, the old profile, the one you've been using to open those emails was likely corrupted…

Another thing I recommend is to repair Office. From your installed programs, select Microsoft 365 Office and choose Quick Repair. If needed, Online Repair works as well.

Now onto the next step: IF you are using Email Protection from Bitdefender, you can disable it temporarily to test the emails, because I don't exclude security layers interfering with HTML display.. You can also disable Encrypted Web Scan in Bitdefender and you'll find this feature under the Online Threat Prevention security module. Let me know if you cand find it, if not, I can provide a couple of screenshots to show you were it is exactly.

And this goes without saying, make sure both Office and Windows are up to date, and that the drivers are also updated. That's very important.

If the issue persists after trying the above steps, check those emails using another web client, so forward them to another inbox and if that email client/inbox displays the emails correctly, that confirms the messages themselves are O.K. and the problem is elsewhere.

We can of course dig deeper into this from our side, but first I need to get your feedback on what happens locally, to exclude a potential issue on that device. Because like I said, I couldn't find any issues on the sender's side, at least not during my tests.

Thank you for taking the time to do this and I'm looking forward to your feedback.