Dealing with garbled emails

Problem: Your discussions from incoming email contain weird garbled text, when the email in your mail client looks fine.

If you see results like this, then something in Tender Support is not parsing some incoming emails correctly. The best thing to do if you have no clue how to proceed is to send the raw text of the email to us (email or start a discussion). Preferably it should be saved as an attachment so that it's much easier for us to inspect it.

Sometimes, the bug lies outside of Tender, so any other information you can provide would be great. For instance, we have a customer generating support emails from their application. Sometimes they resulted in garbled messages like the first screen shot. We did some scanning and found that the application was breaking up the encoded text. The subject looked like:

=?utf-8?Q?Afternoon,

The body started with the rest of the subject, the ?=. The =?utf-8?Q?....?= syntax is a way of encoding unicode strings for the raw ascii mail format. The customer's application was incorrectly truncating part of the string, so that Tender's email parsing was not able to decode the unicode wrapper. Working with the customer, we were able to identify the problem so they can fix it, and attempt to provide a more friendly parser on the Tender Support side.

Naturally, we don't require all (or any) Tender users to be programmers well versed in processing emails. We'll do our best to parse everything the best we can, and work with you in fixing the issue.