New Posts to emails contain strange characters in subject line

  • Resolved aoife21

    (@aoife21)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi,

    When I publish a new post and it’s emailed to my subscribers, they receive it in their inbox with strange characters, like code, which looks like SPAM so they are not opening it. I can’t figure out the problem. Could someone help me please?

    An example of the email subject line that’s received is like this:
    =??Q?[New_post]_Valentine=E2=80=99s_Day_Lesson?=Inbox

    Thank you!!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Dan (a11n)

    (@drawmyface)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi there

    Could you please post your site URL here so that we can have a look?

    If you want it to remain private, you can also contact us via this contact form. If you choose to reach out directly, please include a link to this thread.

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter aoife21

    (@aoife21)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi there,

    Thanks for the response. My URL is http://www.elt-connect.com but the posts look absolutely fine on the site itself. The problem lies in the emails that go to subscribers only.

    Here is a link to a screenshot of the email received by subscribers. You can see the title looks very strange:
    https://ibb.co/kXJ31Xz

    Thanks a lot,

    Plugin Contributor Jen H. (a11n)

    (@jenhooks)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi @aoife21,

    When these kinds of characters show up in Jetpack Subscriptions, it’s typically due to Jetpack being unable to strip unsupported shortcodes from the notification. The way to troubleshoot this would be to temporarily disable any plugins (or your theme) on your site which uses shortcodes when you create and publish a new post. I know this is less than ideal, but it’s really the only way to determine which plugin is doing it (or, if it is your theme.)

    If you decide to troubleshoot it and figure out what it was, feel free to follow up here to share your findings. 🙂

    Thread Starter aoife21

    (@aoife21)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks @jenhooks

    Unfortunately I’ve no idea which plugins use shortcodes. Is there a way of finding that info so that I can disable only those plugins when i publish a new post?

    Also, is it possible to publish a test post so that I can send it only to myself instead of all my subscribers to try figure this out?

    Thanks again,

    Plugin Contributor Dan (a11n)

    (@drawmyface)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi again

    In these cases it seems it’s actually to do with the quote marks and apostrophes in your post titles. I found another post with the same issue here:

    https://wordpress.org/support/topic/strange-characters-appearing-on-email-subject-line-for-blog-posts/

    Are you copying and pasting the post titles from elsewhere or just typing them in directly. I think you need to make sure that if your post title contains quote marks or apostrophes, that you type those in rather than copy/pasting, and make sure they use regular apostrophes and quote marks instead of the “curly” quotes/apostrophes you used in the posts mentioned above.

    You can read more about the difference here:
    https://www.lifewire.com/typing-quotes-apostrophes-and-primes-1074104

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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