Outlook: May 2022 update (build 15225.20204) breaks HTML rendering in mails

[German]I'll just bring up a topic that has been bumming around here since Monday, May 30, 2022, due to reader requests. Microsoft Outlook users seem to have the problem that one of the latest updates from May 2022 has corrupted the ability to display HTML mail. Only text or a blank mail can be displayed. Below is a brief overview.

Issues with mail rendering in Microsoft Outlook are not new – also within the area of HTML mail rendering. However, in May 2022 several reader comments about Outlook (various versions) came to my attention.

Mails corrupted on forwarding

On May 17, 2022 there was a comment from Simon here in the discussion area – but I didn't take it up further. Since I delete the entries in the discussion area cyclically, I pull this comment times here into the contribution. Simon wrote:

With two of our customers we could notice in the last 1, 2 weeks that emails which are forwarded or to which a reply is sent, the email address of the original recipient is no longer displayed. This disappears as soon as you click on one of the options.

What it should look like:
–Original Message–
From: Peter Muster *smaller than parenthesis* email from Peter Muster *larger than parenthesis*.
———————–
What it currently looks like:
–Original message–
From: Peter Muster *smaller than bracket* blank *bigger than bracket*
———————–
(Hopefully the example is apparent. The larger/smaller than parentheses are not posted).

Re-setting up the mail account has not resulted in anything.

Has anyone else also encountered this problem or/and know of a suitable solution?

Affected Office version: Office Professional Plus 2019 (16.0.10382.20010) on Win10 Pro machine.

here were no further messages about this issue and I did not find anything new in a short search. Only the MS Answers forum post from 2019 addresses a similar error. And there ist a Microsoft support article saying, the issue has been escalated to the Outlook developers.

Build 15225.20204 breaks HTML mail rendering

Blog reader Marcel posted on June 1, 2022 the following comment in the discussion area of my German blog – I've pulled his text out here and translated it.

Good morning Mr. Born

Since Monday morning, we have been getting reports from users where HTML mails are no longer displayed correctly.
With incoming HML mails or HTML mails that are moved into folders, the HTML code is displayed.
Every day there are new messages.

These customers are using Office 2016 or Office 2019, Sophos Entpoint Protection and they are running on a terminal server with Windows Server 2019 1809 (one with Windows Server 2016 1607). All the latest updates are installed, Windows and Office.

Important note.
In the webmail the mails are displayed correctly.

We are not getting any further.

Have you heard about this problem?

Addendum: Build version, for Outlook 2016 and 2019, is 2205 (build 15225.20204 click and run).

This build was deployed to the Current channel on May 24, 2022, and then appears to have been installed on systems on May 30, 2022. The previous version is 15028.20248 from May 10, 2022, but is only supported until July 12, 2022.

For retail versions of Office 2016/2019 C2R the release dates may be found here.

It's related to the click-2-run installation of Microsoft Office – and has nothing to do with the monthly 1st and 2nd Tuesday of the month updates for the MSI installations.

Confirmations and a fix

In fact, since Monday, May 30, 2022, there have been two comments in my German blog to my blog post Microsoft Access: Gibt es Probleme beim SQL-Datenbankzugriff wegen ODBC-Treiber? Blog reader T Sommer reports the bug in Outlook and also gives a solution.

This May update of Office has also corrupted the preview of HTML mails in Outlook 2019 – the eMail is simply "empty" in the display.

After a roll back to April it works fine again.

If anyone needs it:
Administrative prompt,
in folder : C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun>

officec2rclient /update user updatetoversion=16.0.15128.20248

Blog reader Willi Lethert confirmed this issue and wrote:

Office version 15225.20204 – Outlook

ALL emails are displayed with text-only format.
Customers with Windows 10 and Windows 11 affected.
Rollback to older version of Office and disable automatic updates for Office, then Outlook runs clean again.

Also this forum post from May 31, 2022 confirms this issue with the build. T Sommer outlined the solution in the comment above (thanks for that). Simply roll back the office version to build 16.0.15128.20248 via the officec2rclient with the /update switch. The build 15128.20248 is from May 10, 2022.

Addendum: See this comment from GFI on KOFF add-on to integrate Outlook with KerioConnect.