[German]Before the end of the year, I will address a bug fix from Microsoft that was already fixed in November 2023. The bug affected Microsoft Outlook 365 and left users quite baffled. When you created a new email, the signature characters were inserted vertically into the email. Occurred when two <br> tags appeared in the signature.
Blog reader Moritz B. has informed me about the problem and the bug fix promptly (thanks for that), but somehow the email got left behind and fell into my hands recently. He wrote that's an interesting but in Outlook 365, that he observed in preview builds.
An entry in Microsoft Answers
In his email, Moritz had sent me a link to the Microsoft Answers forum post Signature auto enters when typing a email from mid-October 2023. Someone there described the problem like this:
Some of our users complaining when answering a mail or creating a new mail the signature automatically enters every letter they type. This does not happen every mail, so it is random. Even if I open the same mail again, one time it does other times it doesn't show op.
When they press enter or backspace its back to normal and the bug stays away for that specific mail.
If you don't fix it and send it to the receiver its looks totally normal.
I have also already created a new signature because I thought it was an HTML problem, but the problem remains.
This is happing with version 16.0.16924.20054 and 16.0.16924.20042. i can't check older version because everyone is up to date.
The screenshot above shows the problem – in the email, the letters of the signature are inserted vertically in the new message. The user writes that the problem would affect various users in his company. Several users confirmed the problem – and in November 2023 there was a response from Microsoft that the team would roll out a bug fix.
The reason for the bug and a fix
There is a support post Outlook Desktop signature auto enters when typing an email from November 2023 in which Microsoft describes the cause of Outlook 365's strange behavior. The behavior is described as: "Iif users create a new email and then want to enter text, the key letters of their signature are inserted vertically in the email," which then produce a result as shown in the above image.
The effect appears to occur if two consecutive <br> tags have been introduced for a line break in the Outlook signature. As an example, Microsoft provides the following HTML code:
<html>
<Body>Greetings<br><br>Username</body>
</html>
The error has been resolved in Outlook 365 since November 2023 because the Outlook and Word teams made a service change to resolve the issue. The fix was released on November 9th, 2023 and should have reached all affected Outlook 365 clients by now.
