Solved starter problems - language, finding items

Yes so my factory settings were in Dutch. I opened language and region in settings and changed it to english but it remains in Dutch. The box on the bottom right also says ENG but most of the settings remain in Ducth.

Secondly, where is Outlook now? The actual outlook you could open and access files/add read receipts and recovered completely deleted emails. The app they have me using doesn't allow me to see read recepts and I could only see them within the actual preinstalled version.

Bruce said:

the inbuilt mail app in Win11 is called Mail and this is probably the one you are using.
Outlook is part of the Microsoft Office suite and needs to be purchased separately.
you can pay about $300 for a one-off purchase of the current version and have it for life, or pay about $10/month for the subscription service and have it auto-update every time a new version comes out.

below is a portion of a BAT file I run on every new PC I setup, the part shown deals with my locale for the east coast of Australia, change it accordingly for yours.

Spoiler: portion of BAT file

powershell "Set-TimeZone -Name 'E. Australia Standard Time'"
powershell "Set-Culture en-AU"
powershell "Set-WinHomeLocation -GeoId 12"
powershell "Set-WinUserLanguageList en-AU -force"
powershell "Set-WinSystemLocale en-AU"
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortTime /t REG_SZ /d "h:mmtt" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortFormat /t REG_SZ /d "h:mm:sstt" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v s1159 /t REG_SZ /d "am" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v s2359 /t REG_SZ /d "pm" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v iTime /t REG_SZ /d 0 /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sLongDate /t REG_SZ /d "ddd, d MMM yy" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sDate /t REG_SZ /d "/" /f
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortDate /t REG_SZ /d "d/MM/yy" /f

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I remember before my read recepits were only forwarded to the outlook programme and not the mail programme. It seems like a security issue if they don't allow the mail app to givwe you read recepits. There must be a way around that.

Bruce said:

agreed, I'd be very surprised if the Mail app doesn't have read receipt capability.

as to a security issue, a read receipt is just a notification to the sender that the recipient has opened the email, and all email software has an option to always silently never acknowledge the read receipt request, so it's always been a stupid feature of no importance. it simply makes the sender feel that their email is important.

my understanding was, from a legal standing, an email sent is deemed to be an email received.

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My concern on that is that I made a thread here before asking why all my read receipts were coming back as some randomised Jargon in Chinese/Japanese. I made the thread asking if I was being intercepted by a man in the middle attack. One issue I raised in the thread was that the read receputs only showed up in Outlook but not in mail.. But 100% mail is not receiving the read receipts. I sometimes get an email response saying the user does not accept read receipts but has recieved the email regardless. The Chinese text will then be sent to outlook and not mail, so it is like having two different inboxes sharing the same space. I went back to the thread I made here to recover some of the text I pasted into it but now it looks like that thread was deleted. Is it normal to delete the threads here after a while?

I had another security issue lately and went back to get them to try find out more ... now I don't have access to my own emails.

Bruce said:

that other thread is there, but for some reason in the Staff section which only staff members can access.

we close threads, not delete them, unless there is a reason!
one way to look for your old threads is to hover the mouse over your avatar, in your case the green P, under Message is says 39, click the 39 and it will list your previous posts.

I don't use Mail, so maybe some of your read receipt issues are Mail related.
as to the Chinese characters, is it actually a Chinese font or just a bunch of wingding sort of symbols - if so, I usually see something along those lines when their mail program tries going from HTML text to plain text.

can you screenshot those Chinese characters for us?

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that's the problems I don't have access to the receipts anymore at all, but I found someone else having what looks like the same problem. I don't know if the language and lack of read receipts are related only that a lot of my mail seems to go missing in transit and situations like this aren't exactly encouraging.

Panthata said:

My concern on that is that I made a thread here before asking why all my read receipts were coming back as some randomised Jargon in Chinese/Japanese. I made the thread asking if I was being intercepted by a man in the middle attack. One issue I raised in the thread was that the read receputs only showed up in Outlook but not in mail.. But 100% mail is not receiving the read receipts. I sometimes get an email response saying the user does not accept read receipts but has recieved the email regardless. The Chinese text will then be sent to outlook and not mail, so it is like having two different inboxes sharing the same space. I went back to the thread I made here to recover some of the text I pasted into it but now it looks like that thread was deleted. Is it normal to delete the threads here after a while?

I had another security issue lately and went back to get them to try find out more ... now I don't have access to my own emails.

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I should rephrase what I meant here. What I meant to say is that the rejection of the read receipt, written in English, will be returned to mail without any problems. If the receipt goes through successfully (I assume successfully) the confirmation email will only go to outlook in chinese but not mail. If it rejected by the receiver I receive the rejection notification in English.

Bruce said:

have you fixed your language/region issue?
can you show a screenshot of these Chinese characters?
so you have Outlook installed on the PC now?

have you tried logging on to your email account via the webmail portal of your email provider?
test the read receipt issue on that platform.

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no to all three. Actually the language problem is now sporadic though with some parts of my config in English and others in Dutch.

I can't get a screenshot of the text but look two posts above and see the link ''redirecting'' on the end and it should lead to an unrelated user who seemed to be having the same problem. I recall the first time around I copy and pasted the code into google and it led me to that result so it should be the same.

Some people in other places also thought it might be chinese computer code but when translated it looks like gibberish. I also entered it into Chatgpt who also confirmed it looked like gibberish.

this was the text: 格浴狹格慥ロベンャ寵族や梨ロオッハロ幅豫梨」 減ﾗチウ立荻兆Iオオトオ w/ 「∽・X口醗Aフロロロクメ邑D-]ロー働 桴口チハ姨ｲ悸テ鮖婁 ヌテ労蓮ﾔ名ロアオB白ォウ」 髪をオキョロ濫茂シャ藝ヨヤ両口・アオBAウ ヤ◇0機雷Y摯狭心

translated for Japanese to English google translates says: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. ya name Roao B Shirao" Okyoro Ranmo Sha Gei Yoya Ryoguchi Ao BA Ya"

Bruce said:

I had 4 questions - which ones did you answer No to?

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The first 3 were no.

I didn't see the 4th, but yes I've tried it and can't find the read receipts.

Bruce said:

is your first language Japanese?

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nope. That's just what google translate said.

re-reading the text again and ignoring google

Bruce said:

the spilt coffee laptop had Outlook yes?
if so, you have a product key that you could use to install Outlook on the new laptop?

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is a problem. Microsoft 365 on the laptop was provided through my college, but they don't seem to be providing it for download anymore only an online version. You honestly I'll check on it again tomorrow because it's quite late here now.

Bruce said:

1) let's fix the language/region issue - run those commands in post #2 from an elevated command prompt.

2) you say you can't get a screenshot of the Chinese text - are you not receiving read receipts with this text any more? what about old read receipts that should be in the Deleted Items folder.

3) in post #8 you mention you get read receipts in Outlook - where are you using Outlook?

4) and to check - if it wasn't regarding read receipts, your emails are working fine?

5) let’s get your complete PC specs.
get Speccy from here; https://www.piriform.com/speccy/builds
in Speccy, click File > Publish Snapshot (hit Yes if prompted to proceed with publish) > Copy to Clipboard > Close.
now you can paste (Ctrl+V) that link into your next post.

Click to expand...

1. I'm holding off on the first one. It seems like every time I try modify something via command prompts etc something goes wrong. I've changed all the settings to english, including chrome, and it keeps correcting it for Dutch. For example every word as I type this has a misspelling underscore, which is distracting.

2. The read receipts aren't in this version of outlook at all. As if they never existed. They were only in the pre-installed outlook tool. The one that has been preinstalled in windows for centuries.

3. I'm not too sure on that. The mail app came with the instalation and when I open it, it says outlook on top. But it is not outlook, more like a merge between mail and outlook. In the original I had the option to recover deleted emails. That is, I could choose to delete an email, send it to the deleted folder, delete it from the deleted folder, and I could then open outlook and find an option to recover emails that had been completely deleted. This is gone now.

4. Many of my emails have been dropping into thin air for years now. This is why I put read receipts on. When I saw them returning in chinese it raised alarm bells. I checked the IP address for them and they are coming from an Amazon server in Dublin beside the street I used to work on ... but idk, if you have someone who can intercept emails they probably know how to use a VPN anyway so it probably doesn't mean much. As mentioned above, I was also surprised before to open my outlook and see emails in the fully deleted folders which I had not placed there, Now I can't see what it is going in there.

5.
Operating System
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 8550U @ 1.80GHz 70 °C
Kaby Lake-U/Y 14nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1064MHz (16-20-20-45)
Motherboard
HP 8438 (U3E1)
Graphics
Generic PnP Monitor (1920x1080@120Hz)
Intel UHD Graphics 620 (HP)
Storage
476GB SAMSUNG MZVLB512HAJQ-000H7 (Unknown (SSD))
114GB USB SanDisk 3.2Gen1 USB Device (USB )
Optical Drives
No optical disk drives detected
Audio
Conexant ISST Audio