What is that gibberish all about? Well, the garbled symbols and letters that some of your email recipients are seeing in their inboxes are the result of a formatting issue. This is a common issue that occurs with both emails and websites.

Basically, different internet browsers and email platforms like Yahoo, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook each display characters and read emails in different ways. The same email may look perfect in Microsoft Outlook and terrible in Gmail. The problem generally occurs with special characters and symbols like apostrophes, ampersands, and quotation marks.

The good news is that there is an easy fix to this problem using what are called HTML character references in place of these characters and symbols. A quick reference of these symbols can be found here. Simply match the desired character in the right column with the code in the left column.

When you are drafting your email you simply need to replace any special characters with their standardized code that is recognized by almost all email platforms. In order to make this change you need to switch to the “code” or “html” view when drafting your email. Then locate each special character and replace it with the standardized HTML character reference.

Please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions or would like us to walk you through the process.