Experience.FellowshipOne.com

I have just run into a strange problem with the Group Email 2.0. No one can seem to figure out why this is happening. If you have any suggestion please let us know.

I've made an email template that works great until we email it to hotmail accounts. It adds the letter "A" in weird places. How can we fix this problem?

Here is the image URL to the problem version: http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h171/SiennaValley/F1Problem-Hotmail.jpg

Here is the image URL to the correct version: http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h171/SiennaValley/F1Problem-Normal.jpg

I have added the html code attachment as well.

Thanks so much for all your help & advice!

Hi -

I tried to send your source code to my hotmail account and had no issues with strange characters.  Have you tried to view this email from a different machine, or by sending to a different hotmail account?

I noticed that your footer had a reference to an image from another church wich does not exist, this could cause some formatting issues.  I can't say for certain that it would cause the issue you are seeing though.

Another note, the <p>  </p> at the beginning of the page should probably not be necessary.  You may try to delete those tags and resend the message.

Like I said, I was not able to recreate the issue, but I'm happy to help test.  You can send an email to my hotmail account (biglew27@hotmail.com) and I'll be happy to report back how the message looked.

Good luck,

Jeff

Sorry, I had to get a new user ID. I couldn't remember my last one and the password/login reminder wouldn't send it to me.

Well, I've made those changes and tested it again. It's still doing the same thing on my account, but not on another. Are you in the "classic mode" while in your hotmail account. It seems like if the account is in "classic mode" then the problem appears. If it is in the new "Window Live Mode" then it does not.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks, Tara

I tried it in both views and could not reproduce the problem. Most issues with phantom characters have been eliminated, but obviously there is still some work to be done. At this point, please put in a support request so that we can track the problems and give them proper attention. By submitting to support, we will have a tracking mechanism and the issue will be turned over to the proper hands for resolution. Be sure to include any supporting documentation, like you did with the original post. I'm sorry for not having a better solution at this time. I'll check with our development team and if I hear of any groundbreaking news, I'll be sure to post here. Jeff

Thanks. I've done that. It's been in the waiting for a while. Hopefully it will get resolved. I appreciate all of your help!

I've added links here as well so that you can see the problem that I am still having... And attached the new code.

http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h171/SiennaValley/hotmail-windows-live-versio.jpg

http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h171/SiennaValley/hotmail-classic-version.jpg

Thanks, Tara

NEW PROBLEM! There seems to be a problem with entouch.net accounts as well... Here's the link to what it looks like...

http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h171/SiennaValley/Entouch-problem.jpg

The top links are wrapping...

I'm jumping in at the end here so I hope I'm not being redundant. It's true that the HTML Editor control we provide within F1 had (may still have) a few issues with special characters.  However, formatting and layout of HTML emails within a variety of email clients like Yahoo, Hotmail, Entouch, etc., etc., etc. will invariably offer different results and has nothing to do with Fellowship One.  You will never get it to look exactly the same.  We've worked in the past with a company that specializes in nothing but email campaigns, the company is CampainMonitor.com. Their sole focus is email and I would consider them experts in the field. They have many, many articles on best practices for properly designing HTML emails but even they readily admit they'll never be uniform. They even highlight that Microsoft's latest release of Office 2007 was a step backward in support of standards.

Here's a link to one of the articles highlighting a difference with how images are handled.

Curtis Simmons
VP, Product & Services

Thanks. I'll check into that... Tara

We have the same type of issue with the F1 group email 2.0. It happens very randomly for us, but enough people have a problem with recieving our emails with strange charaters. What we are doing at this point is also attaching the email in a pdf file and sending it out. Thought i would just post that here so that you could see its not just TPreje3.

 Matt

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Matthew Hardwick
The Rock of Roseville
Media and IT

First, let me complement you on your email design.  I like the organization of the page and content.

 

I work in the Product Management team at Fellowship Technologies.  F1’s Group Email employs the industry standard UTF-8 formatting. Wikipedia defines UTF-8 as:

 

UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.

UTF-8 was created to be a generally recognized format that would unambiguously and safely convey Unicode information between machines and across the Internet. To do that, they sought to remove nulls and endianism from the data stream. The most popular one — practically the only one used — is known as UTF-8.

A quick Google search of “hotmail, UTF-8” produces over a million hits of individuals and organizations expressing their frustration with hotmail not being current with industry standards.  Microsoft is trying convert their Hotmail user base to Windows Live Mail, which does conform to UTF-8 standards.

 

To alleviate (or at least reduce) the weird or random characters in Hotmail, we (and other organizations) have encoded a sequence that escapes any ASCII character over 127. Once we added this escape sequence, the support tickets we received on unwanted characters in Group Email dropped significantly.  We get a new ticket maybe once a month reporting something similar to what you describe.

 

OK, enough of the techno jargon and history.

 

One suggestion is that you include a "View web version of this message" link at the top of your email. The link can be automatically generated to a Web-hosted version by your email service provider or to a link to your Web site. I have read that organizations that employ this method see  about .5% of their email recipients use this link to view their email, suggesting that about 1 in 200 recipients have formatting issues with their ISP’s email.

 

Thanks for providing you base html.  I will have my peers review it to see if they can see an issue. I see that you do have a ticket open on this issue in you support system. I will call you after the Thanksgiving holiday and we can discuss offline.

 

Thanks,

Scott