Users getting corrupt links to my site in their emails

[Giscardo]

At work we send out emails to our users, and the emails have a link with encrypted data, two pieces of encrypted data.

http://www.mysite.com?dataItem1=[encryptedString1]&dataItem2=[encryptedString2]

this works for 99% of users, but for some we get this problem where they somehow enter or follow a link that is corrupted.

Some of them have the value "3D" appended to the beginning of encryptedString1. Others seem to have the ampersand character (that delimits the two data items in the querystring) HTML encoded to "&".

A few (far fewer than above two errors) have %20 (html encoded spaces) and some have plus or equals signs in there as well. I think the "3D" value may have been a chopped off "%3D" which is an encoded equals sign. But the equals sign between the key and value in the query string is still there in that case too, i'm not sure what's up.

Any ideas how this could happen? Are there browsers or email clients or settings within common applications that could cause this?

 

[Giscardo]

bump

 

[Giscardo]

bump again..

 

[kamper]

I think you've correctly diagnosed the problem, although that's not 'html encoding', it's the rules for url encoding. That's so that if you wanted to pass a space (encoded '+') or an ampersand or anything else with special meaning in the url, you can do it without actually have it mean something special. Of course, that doesn't solve your problem. But yeah, it is probably the email client that is doing the url encoding one too many times. What clients are these specific users using and what clients are the successful users using?

 

[n0cmonkey]

What email client?