Programming emails to send with special symbols

[blitzen]

Hi,
This has been annoying me for the longest time.

I have and use a registered trademark symbol, sometimes in the email subject.
It looks great when I get a copy of the email, but sometimes customers respond back and the trademark symbol either turns into a "R" or some other bizarre character, especially in the subject field and sometimes in the body.

I know this has to do the collation/character encoding but I haven't been able to find a good way to get this mark across all emails properly.

I could use the (R) but most people don't understand that - they do understand the ®.
Besides, people get confused with an "(R)" and think it's part of the name.

Is there a way to send emails (I use sendmail) so that the ® is retained?

Thanks

[morestar]

Hi Blitzen, so I presume you've tried using the following: ® which is the ascii code for the Registered trademark symbol you're trying to use.

I've looked around for you and got this piece of information related to Unicode and e-mail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_and_e-mail) at the Wiki:


To use Unicode in e-mail subject lines and e-mail addresses two different standards need to be used to retrofit the handling of non-ASCII data to the originally ASCII-only e-mail protocol:


RFC 2047 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2047) provides support for encoding non-ASCII values such as real names and subject lines in e-mail headers
RFC 3490 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490) provides support for encoding non-ASCII domain names in the Domain Name System



My search was "ascii symbols in email subject".

Have you looked this far?

[rah]

I don't know if you are aware of this but by having any special characters in a subject line causes your possible spam count to rise when going through filters.

I know the answer of not using any special characters is not what you wanted to hear, but it will probably help you in the long run to not use them at all.

[blitzen]

Hey Rah,
If you return to this, I'm interested to know about what causes spam count to increase. That's interesting about using required symbols such as the ®. I guess I'll just have to drop that?
I think I'll look for a post, or start one on what makes email go into spam. That happens for our emails, even with generic text emails.

[rah]

There are a lot of little things that you technically aren't supposed to do (with special characters in the subject being one of them). I'll give you a couple more of the big ones we deal with a lot here.

1 ) IP address of where the mail is coming from.
2 ) Invalid HTML code.
3 ) Javascript/Flash (Don't use them).
4 ) Text to picture ratio (More text and less pictures generally go better).
5 ) Keywords (Obviously saying anything adult gets flagged. Little gems we find are: Click Here, Analytics, Be Considered, etc.).
6 ) How fast mail is sent to a mail server (We seem to always have issues with AOL and the like).
7 ) File size of actual HTML (The smaller the better).
8 ) Text only varient when HTML is not allowed.

There are more, but this should be a good starting point.

[Clint1]

Blitzen (and Rah), just FYI, clicking your link in the WPW newsletter results in "No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator". I had to go to your CP area to find threads you started in order to find the thread. The URL in the email is: http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/109000-Programming-emails-to-send-with-special-symbols-like-
...and one of this page is:
http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/109000-Programming-emails-to-send-with-special-symbols-like-®

You don't say if you're sending the emails in HTML format. I get dozens of emails each day from my suppliers with the "R" symbol in them, and they are HTML format. OE and Outlook have no problem with this. But many people only read email in plain text format (or have it set to reply in plain text format) which is going to mess things up with any type symbol such as that.

[Clint1]

Hey Rah,
If you return to this, I'm interested to know about what causes spam count to increase. That's interesting about using required symbols such as the ®. I guess I'll just have to drop that?
I think I'll look for a post, or start one on what makes email go into spam. That happens for our emails, even with generic text emails.
This is a common technique spamming parasites use with the subject line. Therefore some anti-spam filter types will block/flag them.

[rah]

I'ved fixed the issue with the url from the newsletter.