Here we list a few tips that might explain some unexpected behavior in Emarsys when working with email campaigns.
Contents:
Emails are only partially delivered
If you find that your email content cuts off in the middle, that is usually caused by illegal characters being used. Examples of this are listed below.
Using @@ to enclose text
You must not use @@ to enclose any static content in the body of an email campaign (i.e. “@@ text @@” or “@@ 高層海景 廳大房大 可按8成 有匙即看 @@”), as this will cause the mail to break and be only partially delivered to the recipients.
The reason for this is that “@@” is used in legacy personalization as a conditional boundary.
Testmails are not delivered
Since testmails are not sent using our regular campaign launch mechanism, they are not tracked in the same way. If you find that a testmail is not being delivered you can work around this by launching it as a regular campaign.
- If you are using an email address that you entered manually, save this as a list or segment.
- Copy the email campaign and launch it immediately to your testmail list or segments.
- After a few minutes, check the email analysis for that campaign to see if it bounced.
- If there is no bounce, this means that the emails were delivered to your servers, and you must check with your own email administrator to find out why they did not reach the right inboxes.
Invalid characters in the email content
Although emojis are supported in the subject line of an email, they are not supported in the body text.
If you email body text contains an emoji or other unsupported characters you will not be able to launch the email and will receive an error message.
Invalid characters in email addresses
Generally speaking, the local part of an email address (the part before the @ sign: example@emarsys.com) supports any ASCII character. However, most clients, forms and providers will not allow them. It is therefore recommended never to use any special characters except for underscore (_
), dot (.
) and dash (-
). The domain part (the part after the @ sign: example@emarsys.com) is even more restrictive.
Here is a simple graphic showing which characters can reliably used.

Emarsys checks all email addresses before launching an email campaign. If an address contains an invalid character, it will appear as Wrong email address syntax in the Number of emails not sent table on the Results Summary page of the email analysis. There are too many invalid characters to list, but below is a list of all valid characters supported by Emarsys. If a character does not show up, it is invalid.
You may want to create a segment of contacts with such email addresses and try to engage them on another channel, and obtain a valid email address for them.
Local part
Character | Valid in Emarsys | Valid globally (in theory) |
---|---|---|
_-+%&/'= | yes | yes |
$!#|{`^?}~* | no | yes |
ß | no | no |
ÄäÖöÜü | no | no |
ÁáÓóÉéÍíÚú | no | no |
Domain
Character | Valid in Emarsys | Valid globally |
---|---|---|
Aa-Zz | yes | yes |
0123456789 | yes | yes |
- | yes | yes |
There are efforts to start allowing non-ASCII characters in email addresses due to the increasing number of people using non-latin-based languages (RFC 6530 standard that would allow UTF-8 characters), but this has not yet had any impact globally.
‘Counted’ Sections
This is a safety feature in the VCMS editor which ensures that no contacts can receive an email which contains no meaningful content. It does this by checking that every contact in the launch list is eligible to see at least one section that has been marked as counted for sending.
The counted sections are defined in the Emarsys template, and are typically those section groups which contain the core message of the email (i.e. not the header or footer). Every template must have at least one such group.
With this feature, you can highly personalize your emails and target different segments within the same launch list with tailored content. If a recipient fails to qualify for this content, they are excluded from the launch and listed in the Results Summary under No content.
If no contacts at all qualify for this content, for example if you have selected the wrong launch list or made a mistake in the segment criteria, the entire launch will be stopped and you will be notified.
Conflicting Placeholders
There must be no conflicting placeholders used in an email campaign. If the new Emarsys Scripting Language placeholders and the old percent-based placeholders are used at the same time in the same email campaign to refer to external data for personalisation (e.g. eventData and %%eventData%%), we prevent the campaign from being launched.
Amount and currency breaking into separate lines
There is a legal requirement in some countries that the price amount and the currency should always stick together. In some cases, however, these may break into two lines.
The workaround to solve this problem is to insert non-breaking spaces in an ESL snippet after the currency, which will make it stick to the amount. To do this, first add a snippet right after the currency symbol.

Add as many non-breaking spaces to the ESL snippet as you wish.

Click OK when done. The result will be a sticking currency while the spaces are only visible when highlighted.
