Just squashed a rare bug involving garbled characters in Gmail email marketing campaigns
Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2024 4:13 am
Over the last month, a small number of users have reported garbled characters appearing in their Gmail mail merge campaigns with GMass. In most cases they reported characters like “” appearing randomly throughout the text of the email that is sent after clicking the GMass button. The issue tended to surface in emails containing non-English characters.
[Example of an email with garbled characters]
I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of the issue for a while, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t actually reproduce the issue myself…until tonight.
Earlier today, I conducted a screen share session with a user that denmark phone number material had experienced the bug and she was able to walk me through the steps to reproduce the bug. After capturing some data, and spending all evening investigating, I finally figured out the cause and solved the problem.
The problem only surfaced if the To field of a Gmail Draft contained an email address that contained a foreign character. The mere presence of a foreign character in a single email address would cause all individual emails sent to all recipients of the campaign to receive a message with garbled characters. Even if a test message was sent to just one test address containing non-foreign characters using the “Send Test Email” feature, that test would also contain garbled characters, because the To field contained an address with foreign characters when the “Send Test Email” button was clicked.
[Example of an email with garbled characters]
I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of the issue for a while, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t actually reproduce the issue myself…until tonight.
Earlier today, I conducted a screen share session with a user that denmark phone number material had experienced the bug and she was able to walk me through the steps to reproduce the bug. After capturing some data, and spending all evening investigating, I finally figured out the cause and solved the problem.
The problem only surfaced if the To field of a Gmail Draft contained an email address that contained a foreign character. The mere presence of a foreign character in a single email address would cause all individual emails sent to all recipients of the campaign to receive a message with garbled characters. Even if a test message was sent to just one test address containing non-foreign characters using the “Send Test Email” feature, that test would also contain garbled characters, because the To field contained an address with foreign characters when the “Send Test Email” button was clicked.