Email Encoding/Broken Characters Problem

Many users have reported a problem with broken or unformatted characters in their HTML emails which is basically an encoding problem.

You can fix broken characters in email by setting the Content-Type header.

With our Newsletters plugin for WordPress, the Content-Type header of the emails are set to HTML or TEXT depending on the email and then defines the character set CharSet to the character set configured in your WordPress settings. The default is UTF-8

Here are some things to check if you have encoding issues with your emails using our WordPress Newsletter plugin:

1. Content-Type Meta Tag in Newsletter Template

Make sure that your newsletter template has the following META tag inside the HEAD section:

Some email clients use this META tag to determine the encoding of the email.

2. Check WordPress Charset

The Content-Type character set is defined to the character set of WordPress. The default is UTF-8. Check your wp-config.php file to make sure it is UTF-8 and change it if needed:

3. Change Content-Transfer-Encoding

If neither of those work, the transfer encoding of the content could be the problem. The default setting in the plugin is 8bit. You’ll find this setting under Newsletters > Configuration > General > Sending Settings. Try changing that to base64 to see if it resolves the problem: