[BUG] Email marketing tracker URL replacement in Email Marketing messes up and fails.

đź’¬ General Discussion
1

Have I found a bug, or is this a common misconfiguration easily fixed??

The valid tracker URL should be :

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/crm/index.php?entryPoint=campaign_trackerv2&track=15fb e8ff-186d-957a-aaee-51cc2725eeef&identifier=90f0d658-c4c5-7da0-030e-51cc2b25ebc1">Tracker URL.... click here!</a>

The email template contains a tracker URL that’s urlencoded when it shouldn’t be…

<a href="%7BTracker%20URL%7D"> Tracker URL..... click here !</a>

This URL comes in the email as the clickable link,

http://www.mysite.com/crm/{Tracker URL}

which fails with a 404 error.

It seems that SuiteCRM or SugarCRM fails to replace the tracker URL because it needs to see

{Tracker URL}

but TinyMCE editor or PHP itself urlencodes it as

%7BTracker%20URL%7D

when it shouldn’t.

2

Hi Chris,

What method are you using to add the tracker URL to the email template?

Thanks,

Will.

3

Hi Will,

To add the tracker URL, I did the following

  1. Campaign Wizard.
  2. Click the step labeled “Marketing”, on the right hand side of the screen.
  3. I see a screen titled “Marketing Email Copy of Copy of Email marketing June 2014
    Fill out the form below to create an email instance for your newsletter. This will allow you to specify the information regarding when and how your newsletter should be distributed.”
  4. Under “Email template” I click “Edit” (because I’d previously made a simple email template for this marketing campaign).
  5. A pop-up browser window opens.
  6. Click in the TinyMCE HTML text editor area.
  7. Next to “Insert Tracker URL” I click “Insert URL reference” (because I’d previously made a tracker URL for this simple one-target campaign).
  8. The tracker URL reference is inserted in the TinyMCE HTML text editor.
  9. I realize I have to fix the HTML because at the end of each line is 2 or 3 strange garbage characters!
  10. So I click the “HTML” button in TinyMCE to bring up the pop-up raw HTML editor.
  11. In the raw html editor I see the urlencoded or escaped characters which are:
&Atilde;&sbquo;&Acirc;&nbsp;
  1. I notice that the Tracker URL reference is also urlencoded, or htmlescaped, which might be a problem…?? The curly brackets are replaced by %7B and %7D and spaced replaced by %20 …??
  2. In the end, it’s not 100% sure whether this behavior is truly a bug or not, because SuiteCRM can’t or won’t send the marketing email out to my target…!! The timed scheduler job is running every 5 minutes. Campaign reports 0 emails sent…!!

Is this a bug ??

4

Hi there,

What browser are you using? I am able to edit the HTML Email Template without the Tracker URL or other characters being replaced by their URLEncoded counterpart.

Thanks,

Will.

5

Hi Will,

We’re using Safari 5.1.7 browser (latest version on windows). Safari 5.1.x is supported by sugarcrm/suitecrm - you see this when you try to login with an unsupported browser such as Opera (and Opera should be supported in my opinion - it’s more standards compliant than most supported browsers).

  1. I sent the campaign emails, and discover that suitecrm performed the replacement of the URL correctly, despite how TinyMCE has URLencoded the curly braces which start and end the Tracker URL.

  2. The serious problem of TinyMCE on my server adding

&Acirc;&nbsp;

everywhere in the text of the email template, I fixed this (I believe, it’s still early days testing) by adding the following setting to my php.ini :

default_charset = utf-8

Sugarcrm/SuiteCRM should really notify you with a popup in the admin area at the very least, when this setting default_charset is other than utf-8, and tell you that it must be set to utf-8, if indeed that’s the requirement…