The Problem
When HTML email is rendered in the email client, odd looking characters and question marks show up out of place in the body of your message. In other cases, strange characters will appear in place of accented characters or other symbols.
The Cause
The letters, numbers, or symbols that make up the text of your email might not be uniformly encoded (using the same character set) throughout your broadcast chain. The broadcast chain for HTML emails starts with the HTML editor and ends with the email client, however, there could be other stops in between where your email text gets manipulated and/or interpreted.
Character encoding is the way letters, numbers and symbols are expressed in numeric values that the computer can understand. In a character set (charset), each character is represented by a series of bits (0’s and 1’s) that define a group of one or more writing systems. The two most popular are iso-8859-1 and UTF-8. Both of these groups encode Western European characters, bu are very different from one another. This is why applications or computers need to know the character encoding of the data being transmitted when communicating with one another.
The Solution
To avoid this problem, it is important that you save your HTML document in the proper encoding format. Many HTML as well as text editors allow you to save files in different character encoding formats such as the Western European ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. You also want to make sure that you select the right encoding option when uploading your HTML document into your email marketing application. BlastWizard, for example, uses the Western European ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin 1) as its default format, but offers a whole range of character encoding formats to match with your document (dropdown menu on the ‘upload new document’ screen).
In addition, always make sure that your document has a “Content-type” <meta> tag in the <head> section of the HTML code (such as charset=iso-8859-1 in an XHTML/HTML meta tag, or encoding=”UTF-8″ in an XML declaration statement) that properly declares its character encoding. Here are examples:
For HTML:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
For XML:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
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