Microsoft: Classic Outlook bug prevents opening encrypted emails

Microsoft is investigating a bug preventing recipients from opening encrypted emails in classic Outlook after a recent update.

This known issue affects users who try to open messages encrypted with "Encrypt Only" permissions, which also allows copying, printing, and forwarding.

"After updating to Current Channel Version 2511 (Build 19426.20218) recipients may not be able to open 'Encrypt Only' emails," Microsoft said.

"In the Reading Pane you may get a message 'This message with restricted permission cannot be viewed in the reading pane until you verify your credentials. Open the item to read its contents and verify your credentials'."

On impacted systems, users are seeing a message_v2.rpmsg attachment instead of readable content, making the encrypted messages inaccessible.

Microsoft said that the Outlook Team is currently working on a fix, but did not provide an estimated timeline for resolution.

Until a permanent fix is available, Microsoft provides two temporary workarounds. One of them requires senders to save encrypted emails after encryption and before sending, enabling recipients to open them normally.

Alternatively, users can revert to the previous software build that isn't affected by this known issue. This requires affected users to close all Office apps and run the following command from an elevated command prompt:

"%programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe" /update user updatetoversion=16.0.19426.20186

Microsoft also mitigated an Exchange Online service outage in November that blocked customers from accessing their mailboxes using the classic Outlook email client. One month earlier, it fixed a major bug that prevented Microsoft 365 users from opening classic Outlook on Windows systems.

Earlier in the year, Microsoft addressed classic Outlook bugs that caused CPU spikes while typing messages and broke email drag-and-drop functionality after installing Windows 24H2 updates.

Before this, Microsoft also shared a temporary workaround for a known issue that caused Outlook errors when opening encrypted emails and fixed a bug that triggered classic Outlook crashes when opening emails or starting new messages.

Source

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Posted Thursday 8 January 2026 at 5:00 am AEST (my time).

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