Mass mail - email content deleted every time I try to send it

[kanjigirl]

This started yesterday - I typed a big email into Mass Mail going to 49 recipients. Previewed it, all looked good, clicked Send and the mail content disappeared, the error was something like 'no content found.' I tried it again, saved the content before clicking send, same problem.

 

This is in Chrome.

 

I sent a ticket to WHMCS and 14 hours later got this answer:

 

++++++++++++

 

Are you currently running PHP 5.4? If so then something to note is that in this version of PHP the default charset was changed to "UTF8". Now, normally this doesn't make any difference as most applications use utf-8 any way.

 

However, WHMCS is a little different in that it lets you define your System Charset at Setup > General Settings > General. This, unfortunately, allows users running PHP 5.4 to create an encoding issue within their installation. If you're running PHP 5.4 and are using a System Charset other than "utf-8" then data containing special characters will dropped upon submitting it to the database. (You're currently using "iso-8859-1" as your System Charset which is why this is occurring.)

 

So, how do you fix this? There're really only two options to resolve this:

 

1. Change your System Charset to "utf-8". Something to note is that this will cause any characters previously encoded with "iso-8859-1" to become corrupt and they will need to be re-entered. It would also be recommended to change the encoding on your database to utf8_general_ci and convert any characters over to that as well. This would be the ideal solution, however you may need assistance from a database administrator to accomplish this.

 

OR

 

2. Downgrade your PHP installation. As this issue only affect PHP 5.4 this means that this can be resolved by downgrading to PHP 5.3. This is not the optimal solution, but it is fast.

 

++++++++++++

 

A few issues with this answer... my host tells me the last PHP update was in April:

 

cP/DEDI root@209.236.121.46 [/home]# php -v

PHP 5.4.27 (cli) (built: Apr 22 2014 17:28:55)

 

And since then I've sent a number of Mass Mails successfully to many clients with no problems at all. I don't understand why the UTF8 problem is suddenly happening, if it is the cause.

 

And also, I don't have a default charset on my server:

 

cP/DEDI root@209.236.121.46 [/home]# php -i|grep -i charset

default_charset => no value => no value

 

I really need to mail my clients today, can anyone advise?

[kanjigirl]

I was able to send Mass Mail in Firefox with no problem at all, I didn't make any changes to encoding or anything else in WHMCS or on my server. Mass Mail does *not* send in Chrome. Still no answer from WHMCS support.

[brian!]

are you using any extensions with Chrome?

[kanjigirl]

Yes I am. But I switched the encoding under Localisation to utf-8 and was then able to send a Mass Mail in Chrome too. I don't understand why the browser is affected by encoding...