Notification emails in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 consist of unreadable symbols or hieroglyphs

Challenge

Email notifications sent by Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 are unreadable.

Cause

The issue is caused by an encoding conflict. By default, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 uses UTF-16 character encoding, and the issue appears under following circumstances:

1. Use of Mimecast or Thunderbird
2. Office 365 organization located in Microsoft Azure China or Germany regions.

Solution

Email notifications encoding can be changed in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 version 1.5.0.1318 and 2.0.0.x. Depending on whether this is a test notification or not, an email will be sent by Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Service or Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Proxy service respectively.
To change email notifications encoding, do the following:

1. Ensure no backup jobs are running
2. Stop Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Service
3. Stop Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Proxy service
4. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup365
5. To change encoding for test emails, edit Config.xml file by adding the following line between <Veeam> and <Arсhiver>:
   <Email MessageHeadersEncoding="UTF-8" MessageSubjectEncoding="UTF-8" MessageBodyEncoding="UTF-8" />
   
6. To change encoding for email notifications sent by a backup job, edit Proxy.xml file by adding the same line there:
7. Start Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Proxy service
8. Start Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Service
9. If you have any remote proxies, repeat steps 1, 3, 4 and 6 for each remote proxy.