I’m having trouble with a dagger character not showing up properly in Gmail when I send HTML emails. The weird thing is that it works perfectly fine when I test it locally and also displays correctly in Outlook. But when the email gets to Gmail, the dagger symbol just disappears or gets stripped out completely.
I’ve been using putsmail through Litmus for testing, though I don’t think that should affect how the character renders. I even tried wrapping the dagger in superscript tags to see if that would help, but no luck there either.
Has anyone else run into this issue with Gmail specifically? It’s strange that some email clients handle it fine while Gmail seems to filter it out. Any ideas on what might be causing this or how to work around it?
gmail’s pretty strict about unicode characters in html emails tbh. try using the html entity † instead of the actual dagger symbol - that usually gets past their filters. works for me when other special chars get stripped out
I’ve encountered similar character encoding issues with Gmail’s HTML rendering engine. The problem likely stems from Gmail’s aggressive sanitization process which targets certain Unicode ranges. Beyond using HTML entities as mentioned, you might want to check your email’s Content-Type header - make sure it’s explicitly set to UTF-8 encoding. Also worth testing is using the decimal entity † versus the hex version † since Gmail sometimes handles these differently. If entities don’t work, consider using a small image of the dagger symbol as a fallback, though that adds complexity. Gmail’s email processing is notoriously inconsistent compared to other clients unfortunately.
Had this exact problem a few months back with special characters getting eaten by Gmail. What worked for me was switching to a different font stack in my CSS. Gmail has some quirky behavior with certain fonts when rendering special symbols. Try setting your font-family to something like Georgia, Times, or even just serif as a test. Also make sure you’re declaring your charset properly in the HTML head section with <meta charset="UTF-8">. Sometimes Gmail’s parser gets confused without explicit charset declaration even when your Content-Type header is correct. The dagger should render fine once Gmail’s engine picks up the right font that actually contains that glyph.