A few customers were recently having a problem using Japanese in the subject line of their campaigns. Testing for problems with a language you don’t speak is always going to be a little tricky, so I want to give a big thanks to Jeremy Hedley who’s been extremely helpful in nailing a few issues with Japanese campaigns (even going as far as testing the results across multiple platforms and email clients).
So, thanks to Jeremy’s help, subjects with Japanese characters should work fine now – but please be cautious, a number of email clients won’t handle the characters properly. Based on the results of our tests using default settings, the following email clients DO NOT display Japanese correctly in the subject line:
- Outlook
- Outlook Express
- Hotmail (basic US account)
- Yahoo! Mail (basic US account)
- Eudora (PC version only)
- Lotus Notes
The following email clients DO support Japanese characters in the subject line:
- Gmail
- Mac Mail
- Eudora (Mac only)
- Microsoft Entourage
- Mozilla Thunderbird
Unfortunately the problem isn’t going to go away for good until support for these characters is added to many of the popular email platforms.
