I just fixed a bug that was causing non-English characters in the To “Name” of a sent email to be corrupted. On the receiving end, the recipient, while receiving the rest of the email intact, would also see his/her Name in the To field corrupted.

The issue was due to the fact that GMass wasn’t properly using Encoded-Word format for the To header of sent emails. When you send a Gmail mail merge campaign in GMass, if you’re not using a spreadsheet containing your recipient addresses, you can place contacts directly in the To field of the Gmail Compose window. Gmail will add the Name of the contact if available. While the To Name portion of a contact can contain foreign characters, the email address portion cannot. For example, here is a campaign all set to go, containing foreign characters in the To Names, and these contacts are all Gmail Contacts, not from a spreadsheet:

The MIME standard states that non-ASCII characters in the headers of emails must be properly encoded in Encoded-Word format, and while GMass was doing this for all other email headers, it was not for the To field. This is now fixed.

Note that this bug did not affect personalization in the Subject and Message. Meaning, if you had used {FirstName} or {LastName} in the Subject or Message, the personalization worked properly, even if the first and last names contained foreign characters. This was solely an issue with how the Name appeared in the To field.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.