Back to two days ago, we were testing new Sender Profile for our client on SFMC. We identified a bug in Sender Profile. You can call it comma risk or special character risk.

The thing is if you only put comma, or only put special character in the Sender Profile, SFMC can well handle it.

But if you put both together, then boom!

E.g. Nestlé Waters North America, Inc

Bad-coded-sender

To solve that, all you need to do is to wrap your Sender name with double quotes.

Please note that this is just a temporary solution for SFMC only. I highly recommend to read through the rest so you have a deeper understanding of what's happening.


Let's dig deeper to see what happened.

So if you save the email out as .eml, open it in the editor. You will find this in the code.

From: =?UTF-8?Q?Nestl=C3=A9_Waters_North_America, _Inc?=
	<courtney.stacks@waters.nestle.com>

It looks fine at the first sight. It does start with =?UTF-8?Q? and end with ?= to indicate that this is UTF-8 encoded. So =C3=A9 will be converted as é. But email From name is still broken.

After I googled out a post, I figured out that the comma is a reserved word in the From name. It is used to separate different name.

So here, the From name is separated to be =?UTF-8?Q?Nestl=C3=A9_Waters_North_America and _Inc?= <courtney.stacks@waters.nestle.com>. Thus, the client can only find the start of the UTF-8 declaration, but no end of it. That makes the sender name freaking weird.

From the post, we also know that wraping quotes is used to indicate that everything in the quotes should be treated as one name. So that makes the solution a lot easier. To solve the problem on a code basis, we'll just wrap the name with quotes like below.

From: "=?UTF-8?Q?Nestl=C3=A9_Waters_North_America, _Inc?="
	<courtney.stacks@waters.nestle.com>

Actually, your ESP (Eloqua, Responsys, Adobe Campaign, etc) should have taken care of that for you. But just in case if you run into my situation that SFMC doesn't take care of it well. You will have to make a little tunning on it.

Here for SFMC specific case. We did a test by

  1. Take out the comma, but leave the special characters.
  2. Take out the special characters, but leave the comma.

And below is what we got.

  1. From: =?UTF-8?Q?Nestl=C3=A9_Waters_North_America_Inc?=<courtney.stacks@waters.nestle.com>
  2. From: "Nestle Waters North America, Inc" <courtney.stacks@waters.nestle.com>

From the result, after we separate the cases, SFMC can work well. But if we mixed both cases up, it's a crap then.

So to solve that, you will just need to wrap your sender name with the quotes like below in the SFMC settings.

sender-comma-risk-solution

That is to say, if you encounter any problem with your from, to, cc, bcc name, try to wrap the name with double quotes see if it will work.

And, That's all!

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, or I explained anything wrong by leaving comments or email me. I'll be happy to hear that.

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