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I looked through a lot of the questions but I can't seem to find anything related to this. I basically have a bunch of invoices which is represented by invoice hashes: 36 character hex with dashes, i.e. (notice the 3D in the 2nd block)

F1111CBD-13D1-11F1-11C2-A1111E111111

So this hash gets emailed out to customers so they can click the link and get their invoices. For some reason, customers who are getting the link with an invoicehash that contains the characters "3D" are getting errors. We found that "3D" was getting truncated when reviewing the emails forwarded to us by the customers. We have our own copies of each and every single email sent out and our emails show the correct hash. I even checked the SQL email logs and see that hashes with "3D" was definitely sent out correctly to the applicable customers.

Does anyone have a clue why "3D" is specifically filtered out from customer emails? My first thought is that the customer's email service has a filter that specifically targets "3D". Maybe their incoming server has some setting that filters it out.

More info:

  • the 36 character hash is generated on table insert as a uniqueidentifier type with a default value of "newid()"
  • a cursor grabs the hash all applicable invoices monthly. The hash is set to a variable that is varchar(100) so there is more than enough to take in a 36 character hash (plus this does not happen to invoice hashes that do NOT have "3D" in it...maybe nvarchar is needed for compatibility?)
  • this randomly started happening (don't believe we had issues with this before)

Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Joe Pineda
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w1ck3d64
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    Is it anythign to do with URL encoding maybe? `3D` decodes to `=` afaik, are the characters just missing or is the link just not working? – Charleh Mar 04 '14 at 16:34
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    Doesn't seem like an SQL problem at all, seems more like a mailer daemon config. problem to me, or an over-jealous anti-spam filter on your clients' side. Which program are you using on your server side to send the emails? Happens with all clients, always with such text? If you create by hand a hash (even an invalid one) that contains string "3D" and mail it, ¿does it happen as well? If you send several mails with the exact same "3D" string to the very same customer, ¿does any of them get thru? Should you send one of those mails to, say, a GMail account of yours - happens as well? – Joe Pineda Mar 04 '14 at 16:45
  • thanks for the quick replies. @JoePineda: we are in the process of testing regular emails right now..from what we can see right now it only affects hashes that contain "3D". – w1ck3d64 Mar 04 '14 at 16:51
  • @Charleh: the characters "3D" are actually missing but are not replaced by whitespace.. for example, if it was "A3DE1234" the customer sees "AE1234" – w1ck3d64 Mar 04 '14 at 16:54
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    Is it for every single client? It may be that their mail client is protecting the links by removing suspicious characters (I'm assuming it's HTML mail since it has links). Have you looked at the mail content? Otherwise like Joe said, it could be anti-spam, content filtering etc. Did you look at the whole email message (RAW) on the client side? – Charleh Mar 04 '14 at 17:00
  • @Charleh: We are trying to find that out right now (it's not as easy since some clients may not have reached out to us yet) but I'm assuming it's only for a certain set of clients (currently, it's only about 3-4 clients out of thousands) so these might be isolated cases. If so, then it shouldn't be a huge issue. Just kinda weird lol – w1ck3d64 Mar 04 '14 at 20:27

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