How To Remove Strange or Special Characters Appearing in eMarketing Emails

Occasionally, one of your customers may note strange or special characters appearing in eMarketing messages that they receive from you. This most often has to do with the encoding that is performed on the text within the application you use to create or copy paste from and the encoding used within the application that your customer then uses to read it. For example, if you use a browser to copy/paste text into an e-mail message that you are going to send such as Windows Internet Explorer, you will most often be using text that is UTF-8 encoded.

UTF-8 is becoming the most dominant character encoding scheme for files, e-mail, and the Web. It also supports international characters. For this reason, the default value for netFORUM Pro's EmailCharacterEncoding system option is UTF-8. If you are not having any issues with your email messages (or relatively few), it is recommended that you leave this system option set at UTF-8.

If, however, you have noticed that many of your messages contain strange or odd characters, you may also choose to set EmailCharacterEncoding to ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). As implied, this scheme does not support international characters. You may find that this works better for your communications and/or process. Contact the Client Services team to submit a case to make the change.

Finally, if you have tried both character encoding schemes and are still having issues with several customers and special characters in your emails, you may need to change your process and how you are obtaining your text. For example, you may need to create your text within the netFORUM application itself using the HTML editor provided when creating a new marketing template.

Or, as a last resort, create your text in Windows Wordpad or Notepad and use Save As. When prompted, choose Encoding > ANSI. This will make sure all special characters are removed.