Question Marks showing up in SENT emails.

Problem reported by Billy Huddleston - 11/11/2016 at 2:26 PM

Submitted

I have a client that is reporting that sometimes when they send out a email, Question marks will show up in places. First couple of times it happened was when they were sending temp passwords for other mail accounts to users. The temp password ended up having a question mark at the beginning or the end. The latest report was a question mark at the beginning of "Thank You," at the end of their email. We have the default ISO set to Western Europe (ISO) and I'm wondering if we would be better off using UNICODE (UTF-8). I've never changed this setting.. so it's default..

Now, I'm not sure if they're cut and pasting from word or free-typing or what. But, this is a bit odd.

Thanks!

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User Replied

11/14/2016 at 12:24 PM

Hi Billy, I'd like to ask a couple of follow up questions on this. First, where are these question marks being seen? Is the sending user seeing these question marks in the Sent copy of the message, or are they being seen on the receivers end post-receipt of the message? Also, see if you could have the user send one of these problematic messages to email addresses on a few different services, on a few different clients. This will help you narrow down where the encoding/conversion issue is occuring. Hope this helps!

Billy Huddleston Replied

11/14/2016 at 12:47 PM

Kyle,

These are showing up to users receiving email FROM my client who is composing the messages using SM Webmail. I've looked at the messages the receiving person gets along with the email in the Senders Sent Items folder and I see the question mark in both places. I've not had anyone else complain about this. The user has used both IE and Edge browser. I have confirmed that the user is not cutting and pasting stuff in from word or some other editor, it's all free-typed into the message.

Thanks, Billy

User Replied

11/16/2016 at 2:15 PM

Billy,

Thanks for following up with me on this, thats definitely interesting behavior. Being that the question marks display in both the sent copy of the message, and the received copy, I believe the root cause is most likely encoding related on the workstations in question, but we'd need to take a closer look at this. What I'd recommend at this point is that the next time the issue occurs, open a support ticket with us including the Raw copy of the message from both the sender and recipient accounts. Raw content can be viewed by opening the message in webmail, and then clicking: View>Raw Content. The raw content of the message will allow us to test internally without affecting your users, which will help us in narrowing down where the question marks are being added. If we determine the issue is a bug in the code, we'll refund the support case back to you before transitioning the ticket to our development team. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Kyle

David Jamell Replied

11/29/2016 at 4:39 PM

I ran into this with a client today and I made sure the "Default User Settings" had Western Europe (ISO) set and then I used "User Propagation" to update all accounts.

After that it cleared up for the client.

CTL Replied

6/12/2017 at 6:39 AM

Is there any update on this thread. I too see sent items have many place unwanted question mark symbols. Smartermail enterprise 15.5

Thanks

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