iOS mail.app appears to strip parts of tokens

[tv2011]

I'm testing CiviMail using a custom template. In that template I have tokens such as {mailing.viewUrl}. They work fine when I view the email in Gmail on my browser and the iOS Gmail app. However, if I view the email in mail.app in iOS, the id part seems to be stripped - e.g. http://example.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id rather than http://example.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=14. When I tap the link on my iPhone I get an error message saying "Missing input parameters".

If I paste an optout link from iOS mail.app into the Notes app, I get a link like this: http://example.org/civicrm/mailing/optout?reset=1&jid&&qid#&h:2c2f4c075b1ec5 instead of http://example.org/civicrm/mailing/optout?reset=1&jid=26&qid=23&h=3a2c2f4c075b1ec5. Is this a text encoding problem?

Has anyone else seen this behaviour on iOS mail clients?

[tv2011]

Looking a bit more closely, I see that the broken link has &h:2c2f4c075b1ec5 instead of &h=3a2c2f4c075b1ec5. I'm guessing it's not a coincidence that the UTF8 hex code for a colon is 3a, right?

[Full Trucker]

Has anyone else seen this behaviour on iOS mail clients?

Yes, actually.

Is this a text encoding problem?

From what I understand, yes, but it's not a Civi problem it's a mail server issue.

Civicrm emails are sent with the following headers:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Whereas it appears email on an iOS device set up with ActiveSync are being re-encoded as 'quoted-printable':

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Our Executive Director and a couple of members were reporting this exact behavior back in January, and what we discovered is it has to do with how the Gmail account was set up for the iOS Mail.app. When Gmail accounts are set up on an iDevice using ActiveSync (i.e. by clicking the "Microsoft Exchange" button when you set up the mail account), the mail server re-interprets the email formatting and causes certain combinations of letters and characters to change. The same thing happens with email hosted on legacy Microsoft Exchange servers, apparently. This is why the links return missing input parameters, because the ActiveSync is changing the characters in the links. From what I understand—Google doesn't support ActiveSync anymore. My guess is because they have all the same features (Email, Calendar, Notes, Contacts, etc.) built into the standard "Add a Google Account" functionality of iOS, meaning ActiveSync is no longer needed to do the same stuff.

[tv2011]

Thanks so much, that's a really helpful reply. It somewhat puts my mind at rest because relatively few of our contacts will have their GMail accounts set up on iOS as ActiveSync. I've tested with my wife's iPad (using Gmail set up the standard way, not ActiveSync) and the emails work fine.

I guess that's an iOS bug then?