Symantec Encryption Management Server Web Email Protection Complete Customization is incompatible with UTF-8 encoding with BOM

Products

• Encryption Management Server
• Gateway Email Encryption

Issue/Introduction

Symantec Encryption Management Server Web Email Protection Complete Customization is incompatible with UTF-8 encoding with BOM (byte order mark).

If you are using only ASCII characters then ANSI encoding is suitable.

If you are using non-ASCII characters such as letters with accents in your Web Email Protection Complete Customization template, ANSI encoding will not be suitable. Instead you will need to use UTF-8 encoding. However, you will need to use UTF-8 without BOM.

Windows Notepad and WordPad can save with ANSI or UTF-8 encoding but cannot save using UTF-8 without BOM encoding.

 

If you use ANSI encoding any non-ASCII characters will not display properly to users of Web Email Protection. This includes any letters with accents. For example, what should appear as:

(the letter D followed by the letter e with an accent) appears like this:

If you use UTF-8 encoding, users of Web Email Protection will receive the error:

An Error Has Occurred

An unexpected error has occurred and been logged. Please contact your administrator if the problem persists.

 

Resolution

Upgrade to Symantec Encryption Management Server 3.3.2 MP7 or above which can correctly process UTF-8 files with BOM.

In releases prior to 3.3.2 MP7, use a third party text editor such as Notepad++ which can convert files to UTF-8 encoding without BOM.

Alternatively, save files with UTF-8 encoding in Windows Notepad and convert files using Symantec Encryption Management Server (for example, you may use other Linux machine:

1. Use SCP to copy the files to Symantec Encryption Management Server.

2. Use SSH to log into the Symantec Encryption Management Server Command Line Interface.

3. Confirm that the BOM is present with the uploaded files:

# head -c 3 WMLogin.html



4. Use sed to convert a single file, eg, WMLogin.html:

# sed -i '1 s/^\xef\xbb\xbf//' WMLogin.html

5. If you have multiple files, convert them all:

# sed -i '1 s/^\xef\xbb\xbf//' *.html

6. Confirm that the BOM has been removed:

# head -c 3 WMLogin.html

<!D[

7. Use SCP to copy the files back from Symantec Encryption Management Server.

 

Applies To

• Symantec Encryption Management Server prior to 3.3.2 MP7
• PGP Universal Server 3.x