TOPIC:

I've been sending messages to our members@ list for a long time. Today I received the message

An error was encountered during the processing of your email to members @ watertownsaturdaytoastmasters.org

and the suggestion to report the problem here. I'm happy to further diagnose the problem myself. Is there somewhere I can find which error occurred during the processing?

If this is the error (from our log) then please try without the special characters in the subject. (I removed them here as they were messing up the forum also.) The code module we are using now for DKIM email security signatures does not like them.... UTF-8 encoding only.

I'm happy to further diagnose the problem myself.

What would be a *huge* help to me is if you can tell me how you produced those special characters in the first place. I have been having fits trying to reproduce this error so that I can figure out how to work around it. Other people seem to be able to produce the issue, but no one has yet given me a way to reproduce it yet.

Care to share how you did it?

(As strange as it may sound, I have to be able to figure out how to crash the system to make it better. )

I was able to get the same "error was encountered" message with a trial message to my saa email address with the following steps.

1. Compose new message in Gmail (web site) on Chrome 60 fon Mac OS X 10.12.6
2. Open the special characters window via Edit/Emoji & Symbols
3. Insert one character in the subject line, the "goal net" (
   
   U+1F945)
4. Send

Perhaps emoji are not good in subject lines? I tried to use the Insert Emoji feature of Gmail/web (smiley icon in the tool bar at the bottom of the message). Each time I did, the cursor was automatically moved from the subject line to the body before inserting the emoji.

In the original email I sent, I composed the message in Gmail for iPad (with emoji in Subject), then edited the draft and sent it via Gmail on the web.

I removed the goal post emoji from the subject line and the message was successfully sent. Thanks for your help.

slothbear wrote:

I was able to get the same "error was encountered" message with a trial message to my saa email address with the following steps.

1. Compose new message in Gmail (web site) on Chrome 60 fon Mac OS X 10.12.6
2. Open the special characters window via Edit/Emoji & Symbols
3. Insert one character in the subject line, the "goal net" (
   
   U+1F945)
4. Send

Perhaps emoji are not good in subject lines? I tried to use the Insert Emoji feature of Gmail/web (smiley icon in the tool bar at the bottom of the message). Each time I did, the cursor was automatically moved from the subject line to the body before inserting the emoji.

In the original email I sent, I composed the message in Gmail for iPad (with emoji in Subject), then edited the draft and sent it via Gmail on the web.

I removed the goal post emoji from the subject line and the message was successfully sent. Thanks for your help.

So you are doing this on a Mac. I use Windows... (maybe a key difference)

When you say you "Open the special characters window via Edit/Emoji & Symbols " , is this a feature in Gmail or is it part of your Mac functionality???

Thank you for your assistance! I really want to get this character encoding thing resolved.

Yes, I believe the "Characters" window is a Macintosh feature. I would assume there is a similar feature for other operating systems to insert special characters. I friend told me to try WindowsKey-period or WindowsKey-semicolon, but I don't have a system to try it on.

If the cursor is in an input field, one of the choices in the Edit menu is Emoji & Symbols. It allows you to enter a wide variety of special characters.

Some info from Apple: support.apple.com/en-us/HT201586

Ok, I was able to reproduce the issue by copying and pasting your goal net character... not a perfect approach, but at least it gets me going in the right direction.

I will try some of the approaches you are mentioning to see what other characters I can enter to cause the issue.

THANKS!!!

I was able to get the same error message "An error was encountered" by sending an emoji in the subject line via Gmail/web on iOS 11 and Android (Fire OS 5.4). Both platforms have a built-in emoji keyboard, which I used to add the emoji to the subject line.

My friend did a little more digging on Windows. On Windows 8+, there is a "touch keyboard" you can enable by right-clicking on the task bar. That keyboard has an emoji mode that allows you to add emoji to subject lines.