Is the method of encoding emails with particular characters and symbols providing you with a battle?
It’s an issue many e-mail builders cope with, particularly if some textual content for the physique of the e-mail will get pasted in from a phrase processor. Symbols and characters may trigger show points in emails in case you’re coding emails for various languages.
Setting the content-type is crucial issue linked to how e-mail shoppers show textual content that features particular characters, together with non-Latin-based languages similar to these spoken in Asia in addition to Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. However e-mail builders may also take issues into their very own palms when it is sensible.
For those who’re seeing purple X’s, query marks in packing containers, or random funky characters that shouldn’t be in your emails, we’re going to take a more in-depth take a look at what’s taking place and methods to repair it. Let’s begin by answering some key questions.
What’s character encoding?
Character encoding is the method of writing or coding particular symbols in HTML so they seem as supposed whatever the system, internet browser, or e-mail shopper. That is executed by assigning a quantity or code to Whenever you don’t have correct e-mail encoding, that’s once you see sudden symbols and empty packing containers.
A selected group of characters is contained in a personality set (charset=” “ in HTML code). Every of these characters is represented by a chunk of code that’s used as a key to breed the character on a display screen.
The Unicode encoding often called UTF-8 is the preferred and dependable method to outline particular characters and symbols on the internet and in emails in addition to different types of digital communication. You’ll be able to set your whole e-mail to make use of UTF-8 character encoding, which we’ll take a look at later.
However first, we must always point out there may be a technique to ensure all particular characters and symbols in your emails show as supposed.
Bulletproof HTML e-mail encoding
If you wish to be 100% sure that every one textual content renders appropriately within the topic line and physique of your emails, the most secure answer is to transform particular characters and symbols to their HTML entities.
As you possible already know, almost each image and particular character has its personal entity title and quantity. When positioned within the code, the entity produces the image or character.
These entities all the time start with an ampersand and finish with a semicolon. For instance, the HTML entity is used for non-breaking areas. Utilizing HTML entities for higher and fewer than symbols (< and >) might be useful as a result of they may very well be confused with tags within the code.
Listed here are some frequent particular characters and their HTML entities:
| Character | Entity title | Entity quantity |
| & ampersand | & | & |
| ® registered trademark | ® | ® |
| £ British pound | £ | £ |
| ¡ inverted exclamation mark | ¡ | ¡ |
There are additionally HTML entities for e-mail encoding that entail symbols from non-Latin languages similar to Chinese language or Greek. Characters from these languages can be represented by Unicode. Listed here are a couple of examples:
| Character | Entity quantity | Unicode |
| 光 Chinese language image for mild | 光 | U+5149 |
| א Hebrew letter aleph | א | U+05D0 |
| Δ Greek letter delta | Δ | U+0394 |
| ॐ Sanskrit image for Om | ॐ | U+0950 |
Even in case you don’t have a worldwide e-mail advertising and marketing technique, you by no means know when chances are you’ll want to incorporate a logo by means of e-mail encoding of particular characters.
After all, in case you plan to transform particular characters in an HTML e-mail manually you’ll want to determine the HTML entity. Fortunately, we’ve obtained a free instrument for that!
Electronic mail on Acid by Sinch constructed an HTML character converter to make your job somewhat simpler. Simply paste in your particular characters and symbols, hit a button, and get the HTML entities that you must convert them within the e-mail physique.
Strive the Character Converter
What’s content-type?
When taking over the duty of e-mail encoding, you can even inform browsers and e-mail shoppers the way you count on them to interpret several types of characters by setting the content-type. Even if you’re changing particular person particular characters to HTML entities, it’s nonetheless sensible to outline the content-type of your e-mail.
You set the content-type by selecting the suitable character set. The 2 commonest character units are UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. Nevertheless, in virtually all instances, you ought to be utilizing UTF-8 as an e-mail’s content-type.
Why is UTF-8 greatest for character encoding in e-mail?
Whereas there are various methods to encode characters, UTF-8 has turn out to be a world customary because of how complete it’s. UTF-8 is able to encoding greater than 1,112,000 completely different characters. That features each written language, math symbols, musical notations, and even the emojis utilized in e-mail advertising and marketing.
The issue with utilizing the ISO-8859-1 character set is that it solely accounts for Latin characters and symbols, which excludes many Jap symbols and glyphs. The picture beneath exhibits how such characters fail to show appropriately utilizing ISO-8859-1 in comparison with UTF-8
The end result on the suitable features a bunch of jumbled textual content, which is the ISO-8859-1 interpretation of the symbols. Discover, nonetheless, when the HTML entity is used, particular characters show appropriately for each UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. That’s what makes that technique foolproof.
The place to designate content-type in emails
For those who’re growing a web site, you’ll be able to designate content-type or specify the character set in a meta tag utilizing code like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content material-Sort" content material="textual content/html charset=UTF-8" />
However as chances are you’ll bear in mind, there are some main variations between internet and e-mail improvement. And that is one more one. Electronic mail shoppers will ignore the content-type within the meta-tag. As an alternative, e-mail shoppers all the time check with what content-type is about within the e-mail header.
The e-mail header supplies a bunch of technical details about the message, together with the date, sender title (from:) and recipient (to:) in addition to issues like e-mail authentication particulars. When an e-mail shopper sees the character set UTF-8 outlined within the head, it is aware of methods to interpret characters all through the message.
How you can set content-type in e-mail headers
Under you’ll see a code snippet of a specific e-mail header that features the content-type set to UTF-8 on the backside:
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:45:55 -0700 To: take a look at@take a look at.com From: testfrom@take a look at.com Topic: UTF-8 Message-ID: <e06deabc923f3378e4b237a20be324cc@www.take a look at.com> X-Precedence: 3 X-Mailer: EOAMailer 5.0.0 MIME-Model: 1.0 Content material-Switch-Encoding: 8bit Content material-Sort: textual content/html; charset="UTF-8"
Setting content-type and defining a personality set is vital for the readability and accessibility of your emails. It ensures nothing breaks the studying sample for a subscriber, whether or not the subscriber is studying the e-mail herself or utilizing a display screen reader with emails.
That’s why Electronic mail on Acid by Sinch consists of the power to set or change the content-type within the accessibility settings of the Marketing campaign Precheck automated workflow. With the press of a button, the platform makes certain the suitable code is added to the e-mail header.
As a result of e-mail service suppliers (ESPs) set content-type within the header, we’ve one other layer of complexity added to our e-mail improvement. If crucial, contact your ESP and ask them what content-type they set within the header when sending the emails. As soon as you understand the content-type, use that worth in your HTML meta tag when designing the e-mail.
In any other case, you’ll be able to all the time depend on the bulletproof technique of changing particular characters and symbols to their corresponding HTML entity.
Electronic mail shopper assist for content-type
One more reason to completely use UTF-8 for e-mail encoding is that it’s extensively supported by main e-mail shoppers. Practically each web page on the web makes use of UTF-8 for encoding as do e-mail shoppers.
We ran checks to see what shoppers did when the content-type was specified within the header and located that Gmail was the one outlier. It doesn’t matter what was designated within the e-mail header, Gmail is the one shopper that mechanically converts your textual content to UTF-8. That features in iOS when individuals use Gmail on iPhones or iPads.
One fascinating motion we seen: The online-based shoppers convert your textual content to the content-type character set earlier than displaying it in an internet browser. We have been capable of examine this by viewing what content-type they have been setting of their meta tags. Because it seems, most of them are utilizing UTF-8.
Is your e-mail encoding working?
In case your e-mail advertising and marketing campaigns have a tendency to incorporate textual content for quite a lot of languages, particular characters, or symbols, how are you going to be assured they’re displaying appropriately.
The reply? You’ve obtained to run checks and take a look at e-mail previews to know for certain.
Whilst you may ship guide checks to several types of inboxes, gadgets, and browsers, Electronic mail on Acid supplies a streamlined method to take a look at your e-mail encoding and all kinds of different elements. That features deliverability, inbox show, Outlook rendering points, darkish mode emails, and extra.
Electronic mail on Acid’s mission is to simplify the complexities of e-mail advertising and marketing. That’s why we create instruments just like the helpful HTML character converter. And, it’s why we’re trusted by e-mail geeks world wide.
Strive the Character Converter
This publish was up to date in February 2022. It was additionally up to date in January 2019 and February 2017 and first printed in 2011.
Writer: The Electronic mail on Acid Workforce
The Electronic mail on Acid content material workforce is made up of digital entrepreneurs, content material creators, and straight-up e-mail geeks.
Join with us on LinkedIn, comply with us on Fb, and tweet at @EmailonAcid on Twitter for extra candy stuff and nice convos on e-mail advertising and marketing.
Writer: The Electronic mail on Acid Workforce
The Electronic mail on Acid content material workforce is made up of digital entrepreneurs, content material creators, and straight-up e-mail geeks.
Join with us on LinkedIn, comply with us on Fb, and tweet at @EmailonAcid on Twitter for extra candy stuff and nice convos on e-mail advertising and marketing.
