Fixed email encoding
Last updated: 19 August 2024
As some of you may have noticed, email newsletters sent between Friday, 16 August 2024 (around 10pm CEST), and Monday, 19 August 2024, looked a bit odd. Here's an example:
Instead of special characters and emojis (👋), the email just displayed their HTML encoding.
Initially, I thought that this was a bug in Ghost, since I have read about it on the Ghost forum a couple of days ago. As it turned out (thanks to a member of the Ghost core team), the issue wasn't within the codebase of Ghost, but in the build process.
Ghost depends on quite a few third-party libraries and packages, some of which have released updates that break existing functionalty in Ghost – such as the encoding in emails. This is usually circumvented by using so-called "lock files", which pin these external libraries and packages to specific versions that are known to work as expected.
As it turned out, both on Ghost(Pro) and Magic Pages, the build process did not involve checking of the lock file. Therefore, the encoding of special characters in emails broke.
This has been fixed on Magic Pages as of 19:00 CEST on 19 August 2024.
Unfortunately, I cannot unsend the wrong encoded emails, however, I want to ensure you that the wrongly sent emails will not count towards your monthly email limit. There is nothing you have to do – I'll substract the emails sent within the affected period within the next 2-3 days.