accents with MLM

[dysong3]

How do you manage accents with MLM? I have names and "opt" fields that have accents and when I preview the messages, in the recipients tab gives me "ÔøΩ" in place of any accent, and in the preview tab, any message with an accent simply wont display at all.

 

[stanbusk]

MLM uses UTF-8 like MaxBulk Mailer. However not all mySQL versions support it. Check your mySQL table if they were created to use UTF-8.

 

[dysong3]

I just use the simple form of MLM, I don't use mySQL. My MaxBulk Mailer was set to UTF-8 in the preferences. What is strange is that I sent out a Newsletter 10 days ago using exactly the same means and set up and this was not a problem. Yesterday I had to go through the entire list and correct all the accents, fearful that "accented recipients" would receive garbled or even no content in their emails. Any ideas what's going on here?

 

[stanbusk]

When using text files MLM also uses UTF-8. Did you transfer a list to MLM?

 

[dysong3]

Yes I did, and I did 1 or 2 imports.

 

[stanbusk]

After transferring the lists to the server did you try (right after) to load the list(s) into MaxBulk Mailer using the 'Remote Lists' option?

 

[dysong3]

yes

 

[stanbusk]

And they were fine?

 

[dysong3]

I didn't notice that they weren't. It was only when I went to send off a newsletter several days later that I realized that all the accents were corrupted (or at least not displaying as desired).

 

[dysong3]

This is getting worse. I work with 2 separate groups of lists on different servers and all the accents display incorrectly. Until this is resolved all the hours of work done making sure that everything is personalized is lost.

 

[stanbusk]

Perhaps it is time to contact your server support. They are the ones that manage the computer where the list are saved. If what you save is not what you get then we have problem. Could you contact them and ask? Please paste the response here.

 

[dysong3]

This is getting worse. I work with 2 separate groups of lists on different servers and all the accents display incorrectly.

However what is bizarre is when I download the lists to verify them the accent display correctly in TextEdit.

 

[dysong3]

I have yet to receive a response from my server administrator, but I appear to have resolved this, at least temporarily, but still do not know how this came about. My lists were initially exported from MBM which was set at UTF-8 universal encoding. I therefore assumed that the exported files were correctly encoded. I have just managed to correct the problem by downloading the files, saving them as UTF-8 and then overwriting the files on the server. Let's hope they stay that way.

 

[stanbusk]

Good to know. That is a good idea.