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Symbols and special characters show up in emails sent via Salesforce

Data pubblicazione: Jun 16, 2026
Descrizione

When emails are sent from Salesforce, the recipient receives the email with garbled characters, symbols, or question marks where special characters (such as accented letters, em-dashes, smart quotes, or non-ASCII characters) should appear.

Possible Causes

  • The email template or email body uses a character encoding that is not supported by the recipient's email client.
  • Content was copy-pasted from a Word document or other rich-text source that inserted non-UTF-8 characters (such as smart quotes or em-dashes in Windows-1252 encoding).
  • The email header does not declare a character set, causing the receiving mail server to interpret characters using its default encoding.
  • The HTML email template includes characters outside the ASCII range that are not properly encoded as HTML entities.
Risoluzione

Step 1: Identify the Source of the Special Characters

Review the email template in Salesforce to identify where the special characters originate. In the template editor, switch to Source view and look for non-ASCII characters or HTML entities such as ’, —, or characters with Unicode code points above U+007F.

Step 2: Re-enter Special Characters Manually

If the characters were pasted from an external source (such as Microsoft Word), delete them and retype the characters directly in the Salesforce template editor. This ensures the characters use UTF-8 encoding.

Step 3: Use HTML Entities for Special Characters

In HTML email templates, replace special characters with their HTML entity equivalents. For example:

  • Em dash (—) → —
  • Smart left quote (") → “
  • Smart right quote (") → ”
  • Apostrophe (') → ’
  • Copyright (©) → ©

Step 4: Verify the Email Template Character Set Declaration

Ensure the HTML email template includes the UTF-8 charset declaration in the HTML head: <meta charset="UTF-8">. This tells the receiving email client how to interpret the characters.

Numero articolo Knowledge

000385715

 
Caricamento
Salesforce Help | Article