Code from Responsive Email Designer is being sent as text not HTML

duncanc · May 22, 2019, 6:36pm

@bcarney ensure that the subscriber has the option of receiving html, not plain text, emails, on the subscriber profile page

and that you are sending an html email, not plain text. on the compose Format tab

bcarney · May 23, 2019, 3:13pm

I double checked, and both those are marked correctly.

Something is changing the code somewhere between steps 1 and the actual sending. Here is a link to the HTML that I’m using:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmEFZaZ67kD-iO4SjD7Gg0nfCehmNg

duncanc · May 23, 2019, 3:40pm

@bcarney One other possibility. Are you sending a test message? If so, then by default phplist will send two emails, one html and another plain text. So you might be looking only at the plain text version. If you haven’t received the html version then it might have been treated as spam or junk.

Using your sample html, pasting into the source view of the phplist editor, works ok for me.

bcarney · May 23, 2019, 3:42pm

I’m not sending them as test messages, I created a list with a couple of my personal emails in it and have been sending to that (so as to learn the software).

The code looks like that image in the editor, but once it’s sent and viewed in the inbox, it’s converted to text.

bcarney · May 23, 2019, 7:55pm

I enabled curl and tried to use the Content: Send a Webpage function, and it too was sent out as plain text. This happens when using the Send Test function as well as when sending the campaign.

duncanc · May 23, 2019, 8:14pm

@bcarney The email sent by phplist is being truncated.

The content type is correct
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;boundary="b1_724d223e149e24be901b583d5154dfd3"

but the email just stops near the end of the plain text part. That is not closed correctly, nor is the html part included.

It looks to be the same problem as reported at If the last character of the footer is a DOT, then DKIM FAILS... WHY?
In that case the cause seemed to be the Exim mail package but I cannot tell whether your server is using that.

bcarney · May 23, 2019, 8:16pm

I did some more testing, using other newsletters composed in Responsive Email Designer. About half wind up going out in HTML, and the others revert to text. I can’t tell for sure, but it appears smaller amounts of code appear to go through OK, and it’s the more complex newsletters that flip to text.

duncanc · May 23, 2019, 8:22pm

It is caused by a dot character appearing on a line on its own. That can easily happen when you have a link followed by a full stop. As you have click tracking enabled, that generates a long URL which often forces the following text to move to a new line.
When that text is only a dot then that appears to hit a bug in Exim.

You can try increasing the line length, as explained in the linked topic to try to stop the dot character being moved to a new line. Or change the encoding to be 8-bit in config.php

define('HTMLEMAIL_ENCODING', '8bit');

bcarney · May 23, 2019, 8:35pm

Hmmmm, I’m using Axigen as my mailer, and it works with my other emailer (Interspire’s Internet Email Marketer) using the same HTML code.

I tried

define('HTMLEMAIL_ENCODING', '8bit');

and that made no difference, unfortunately.

duncanc · May 23, 2019, 8:57pm

Just to try to confirm the cause can you remove the full-stops that are immediately after a link. There are only four of them

website</a>.
www.michigan.gov/dnrdigests</a>.
www.mdnr-elicense.com</a>.
www.michigan.gov/MiMorels</a>.

bcarney · May 24, 2019, 2:05pm

I removed the periods and then sent the message to me. At first I mistakenly left the default footer and the message arrived blank (except for the footer, which was in HTML). When I deleted the footer text the message still arrived blank, except for the Powered by phpList image.

bcarney · May 24, 2019, 2:09pm

I just sent a copy (which will likely be blank) to your phplist@ address. As a reminder it will come from an newsletters@ address.

duncanc · May 24, 2019, 4:51pm

@bcarney I haven’t received the last campaign that you sent.

bcarney · May 24, 2019, 5:09pm

Just sent it again with the subject line “test no periods”.

duncanc · May 24, 2019, 7:34pm

I haven’t received either of the emails, and they don’t appear to have been flagged as spam.

Dragonrider · May 24, 2019, 8:26pm

Just to confuse matters, I copied and pasted your source code into my phpList installation and sent it as a test email, come perfectly.

bcarney · May 28, 2019, 2:59pm

@duncanc - I just sent it again, and I checked the log file and it passed through the mailer so you should have it:

2019-05-28 10:57:31 -0400 08 gop SMTP-OUT:0002903F: Data sent for mail 316FB8; server response code: 250 (OK id=1hVdWl-000WTB-8Y) 2019-05-28 10:57:31 -0400 08 gop SMTP-OUT:0002903F: Set recipient <phplist@dcameron.me.uk> state to SENT 2019-05-28 10:57:31 -0400 08 gop SMTP-OUT:0002903F: Delivery attempt completed for mail 316FB8; schedule for cleanup 2019-05-28 10:57:31 -0400 08 gop SMTP-OUT:0002903F: Set mail state to SENT 2019-05-28 10:57:31 -0400 08 gop SMTP-OUT:0002903F: Disconnected from 77.72.5.10

bcarney · May 28, 2019, 3:00pm

@Dragonrider what MTA are you using?

duncanc · May 28, 2019, 3:44pm

@bcarney I have received the email now. Looking at the source, the html part looks to be badly formed with some elements before the doctype

--b2_e4993deb03908bcd1d8163e09812fe99
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    <head>=0A        <meta content=3D"text/html;charset=3DUTF-8" http-equiv=3D"=
    Content-Type">=0A        <meta content=3D"width=3Ddevice-width"/>=0A       =
     <title></title></head><body><!DOCTYPE html> <html lang=3D"en" xmlns=3D"htt=
    p://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:=
    o=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"> <head><!--webversion%%" titl=
    e=3D""

Are you editing it with the phplist editor? If so then, because the email is a complete html document, you need to change two settings for the ckeditor plugin on the Settings page
Allow templates to be edited as full HTML pages No
Allow messages to be edited as full HTML pages Yes
otherwise when editing a message some of the html will be removed by the editor.

Or disable the editor and just copy/paste the complete html.

The hosting account that sends the original email successfully is using Exim 4.91. Your email seems to be sent using sendmail

Received: by gop.senate.michigan.gov (Axigen sendmail invoked by uid 33)
 id 316FB8; Tue, 28 May 2019 10:57:14 -0400

bcarney · May 28, 2019, 3:54pm

Actually, that’s what I’ve already done - I have ckeditor disabled, and I’m pasting the entire raw HTML page that is generated by CoffeeCup’s RED into the box. And taking a look at the snippet you posted above, it appears phplist is adding code before my HTML (plus it’s adding all those 3D characters for some reason. My code starts with this:

 <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"> <head>