This article provides steps to troubleshoot an issue where special characters — such as Japanese, Korean, Maori, or Russian characters — display as '???' in an HTML Email Template received by the email recipient.
This issue is caused by an incorrect character encoding setting on the email template, the Lightning Email Template, or the user's personal email encoding settings. The correct encoding to use is Unicode (UTF-8), which supports all international character sets including Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji), Korean (Hangul), Russian (Cyrillic), and Maori.
There are three places where encoding can be set. Check and update each one:
A. Change Classic Email Template Encoding to UTF-8
B. Change Lightning Email Template Encoding to UTF-8
Lightning Email Templates do not have an encoding option in the UI. Use the Developer Console to update the encoding field:
SELECT Id, Name, Encoding FROM EmailTemplateC. Change Email Encoding on Personal Settings
See Also:
000384831

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