Links are broken by Ampersand encoding.

P

Papapooch

Member
Hi all. I placed this question in a Support Ticket yesterday but I have not heard back yet, so I am trying the Forum to see if anyone has a suggestion.

We have a link in a customer's template that gets broken when processed and sent by Mailwizz such that, when clicked, the link produces this Web Page output.

"The URI you submitted has disallowed characters."

I am showing a partial link to display the location of the "broken" &.

The MW editor is saving "donors_and_supporters/&titles_only " like "donors_and_supporters/&titles_only" and NOT converting it back to & when the link is clicked.

I have link-tracking on of course. When I receive the email sent by Mailwizz I click on the link and what shows up in the browser URL is the & version of the link..which does not work.
I have confirmed this by trying both versions of the URL in Chrome.

We are using version 1.6.1.
Was this a bug that is now fixed in a newer version?

Anybody else have this problem and know of a fix?

Thank you
 
Papapooch said:
"The URI you submitted has disallowed characters."
Click to expand...
This is something CodeIgniter used to show, and it shows it when it sees various chars in urls, ampersand included, so fix the issue there.

Papapooch said:
The MW editor is saving "donors_and_supporters/&titles_only " like "donors_and_supporters/&titles_only"
Click to expand...
It might be the case, but keep in mind that the links are decoded in the backend so they should work regardless, as long as your app accepts ampersands in the url.
 
Hi Twisted. I guess I need to clarify. Yes "the links are decoded in the backend" for the most part. But in the Email Template supplied by a customer, the ampersand in the link is not decoded...for whatever reason. Also the link points to a Web Page owned by the customer and I cannot change anything there whether it was written in CodeIgniter or not...I have no control over it.

I have included a Text file with 2 links in it so you can compare directly the behavior in Mailwizz. Create a template in MW with it and you will see what I mean. Both links include ampersand in the URL...but only 1 link is decoded properly. In my copy of Mailwizz, when the "bad" link in the Sent Email is clicked, the URL encoding appears in the Address Bar and the link fails. The "good" link works as expected.

BTW...I got around the problem by using %26 in the Link URL instead of & and that seems to work fine.
 

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The customer's website is http://www.responseunlimited.com . It is included in the bad link that doesn't decode properly. They hire us to send their marketing emails from time to time. The link I sent in the text file is the same one they included in their template. They tell us it works just fine for other Email senders they hire to send advertising emails for them.
 
@Papapooch - the link you had broken is broken because it is not properly formatted. Mailwizz simply uses it as you paste it and redirects in the location based exactly on the link you have created. So it's entirely up to you to paste the link in the correct format.
Attached is a file which you should unzip and put instead of /apps/common/components/helpers/StringHelper.php which should fix most of the issues when pasting such urls, but again, you really should paste correct urls.
 

Attachments

We send millions of emails from hundreds of customers. They send us email templates they have used with other vendors with success. So to tell them that our system cannot process their links sounds like excuses to them. Here is the link exactly as we received it from the customer's template. (P.S. I use "customer" in the generic sense...not as a customer-account in Mailwizz). Can you tell me what is wrong with the link such that it works in other email platforms but not in Mailwizz? That way I will know what to look for in the future.

href="http://www.responseunlimited.com/li...e|asc&searchGroup=lists_channel&currentPage=1"

Sometimes there are many "money" links in a client's creative, and because of the large volume we can't spend the time examining each link. This is the first link in millions of emails that did not render properly in Mailwizz. So if you point out the problem area in the link that would be helpful.
Thanks
 
Your customers paste garbage html as links, for example instead of a regular ampersand, they use it's html entity instead, which is not a problem with mailwizz but it's a problem with the target destination because some websites don't support you throw garbage at them.
So while mailwizz accepts this url just fine:
Code: 
http://www.responseunlimited.com/lists/detail/trump_for_president_-_faith-based_donors_and_supporters/&titles_only%3D1%26keywords%3Dtrump%26sort%3Dname%7Casc%26searchGroup%3Dlists_channel%26currentPage%3D1
When you access the site, the site will not handle it entirely, the correct, decoded url, is:
Code: 
http://www.responseunlimited.com/lists/detail/trump_for_president_-_faith-based_donors_and_supporters/?titles_only=1&keywords=trump&sort=name|asc&searchGroup=lists_channel&currentPage=1

Anyway, as i said, mailwizz has no issue with whatever you throw at it, we save what you give us and we redirect to that location.
It's the end site which will have issues with such links.
 
Papapooch said:
We send millions of emails from hundreds of customers. They send us email templates they have used with other vendors with success. So to tell them that our system cannot process their links sounds like excuses to them. Here is the link exactly as we received it from the customer's template. (P.S. I use "customer" in the generic sense...not as a customer-account in Mailwizz). Can you tell me what is wrong with the link such that it works in other email platforms but not in Mailwizz? That way I will know what to look for in the future.

href="http://www.responseunlimited.com/lists/detail/trump_for_president_-_faith-based_donors_and_supporters/&titles_only=1&keywords=trump&sort=name|asc&searchGroup=lists_channel&currentPage=1"

Sometimes there are many "money" links in a client's creative, and because of the large volume we can't spend the time examining each link. This is the first link in millions of emails that did not render properly in Mailwizz. So if you point out the problem area in the link that would be helpful.
Thanks
Click to expand...
Until mwz will have the ability to automtatically fix this, use ExpressionWeb if you need to help customers, simply paste the odd URL in the design area, and it will produce the correct URL in the href code ;)
 
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