multiple semicolons in To/cc/bcc truncates recipient list

I frequently try to send out an email to multiple people by copying e-mail addresses from a Google sheet. Doing this occasionally results in semicolons appearing in pairs between recipient names (i.e. [email protected] ;; [email protected] ; [email protected]). As no error occurred, I assumed that eMClient was able to cope with this OK, but it appears that instead the recipient list is truncated at the first double semicolon and no-one after this would receive anything (in my example only email1 would receive anything).

In my sent box I can see the people that actually received anything (i.e. 1 recipient in the above case), which is slightly annoying as I can’t then copy-paste it back and correct it and instead have to rebuild my list.

I think the ideal solution to this would be one of:

  • automatically clear double delimiters
  • warn for this kind of thing before send
  • warn if the number of addresses in send doesn’t match what was in the typed message (eMClient detects the e-mail addresses correctly when typing)

Hi Matt

I was trying to reproduce this. I created a sheet with 5 email addresses.

I selected them and then pasted them into the To field in a new email window.

I guess this is not what you are getting. Can you give an example of how the addresses display in the sheet?

I think this is simple, just copy email as said in OP example and send mail, i.e. copy plaintext email list (@my.srv is just for example, i used real addresses):

**[email protected] ; [email protected] ;; [email protected] ; [email protected]**

And send. Email is send to only first two addresses, everything after two semicolons is forgotten. This is bug.

I know the double semicolon truncates the recipients. To find a solution to Matt’s recurring problem, I was trying to understand how the addresses are presented in the Sheet to see if the way he was copying them would make a difference. He did not say he was copying from a plain text list. Probably it is a formula that is outputting the addresses to a single field. In that case it can be corrected to exclude the double semicolons where an address is absent.

But yes, putting a double semicolon in the recipient list truncates it, probably because in scripts it usually indicates the end of the current input. Hopefully the developers will read this thread and can change that.

The immediate solution anyway is to just remove the double semicolons.

It’s just a plain Google sheet with some sorting and filtering applied to it. It could well be how Google handles filtered rows. Now I know this occurs I know to look for and remove the double semicolons.

I was basically raising this issue to highlight the problem so something could be done to ensure others don’t get caught out. At present there’s no indication that anything is amiss until you start getting people telling you they aren’t receiving your mail

I had the same problem but it only started with the newest version of EM Client 7.1.31849.0.  I keep a list of 50 recipients in a text file and copy and paste the entire list into the Bcc field. I recently discovered that trying to send an email by coping and pasting the 50 addresses into the Bcc field that only the first person was receiving the email. I use to keep all the addresses in a column but evidently the line-feed between each address creates a second semi-colon when pasting. The list was in a column (see below).

1mail@emclient;
2mail@emclient;
etc.
This produces a second semi-colon between all email addresses [email protected];;[email protected];; etc.

Solution:
I changed the column to one contiguous sentence/list like this:

[email protected];[email protected];[email protected] etc.

I no longer get the double semi-colon when copying and pasting the list. I use Bcc a lot but this same method works just fine for To: and Cc: fields.

The previous verson of EM Client accepted double semi-colons and therefore I never gave it a thought until a person emailed me and asked why there not receiving my news letters.

I hope Devs will allow double semi-colons between email address by patching the next version of EM Client.

Happy New Year 2018!

Glad you found a solution that works. :slight_smile:

A vertical list without the semi-colons will paste just fine, so if you are creating a new one and want it to be vertical, don’t use those semi-colons. A horizontal one does need some punctuation, so commas or semi-colons are needed.

A way you can keep your contacts in eM Client so that they will not be synced with your IMAP account, is to save them in a local contact folder.

Even better!  Is this unique (the vertical list with no punctuation) to EM Client?

The list without punctuation also works for Thunderbird and Outlook.