topic Re: Sending an email to an email address that contains an ampersand in SAS Programming

Sending an email to an email address that contains an ampersand

elsga — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:30:26 GMT

I am sending an email from SAS within an rsubmit. Unfortunately, the receivers email contains an ampersand and is not receiving the email even though the log has no errors. Any recommendations?

rsubmit;
filename mymail email
to='send&email@somewhere.com'
subject="test email";
data _null_;
file mymail;
put "This is a test";
run;
endrsubmit;

Re: Sending an email to an email address that contains an ampersand

Cynthia_sas — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:37:51 GMT

Hi:
This may be a question for Tech Support. A few questions that may help you debug the issue:
1) if you send a single email from your system to the receivers system (not using a program -- just using the COMPOSE function of your email system), do they get the email?
2) has the receiver checked their mail application to see whether the programmatically sent mail was misdirected to their junk or spam folder?
3) if you send mail from your program to an address that does NOT contain an ampersand, does the receiver get this mail?
4) Are you sure that all of your system options related to email are correct?

Other than running those tests to get some more context on the scope of the issue, I think your best option for resolving this is for you to open a track with SAS Tech Support.
Cynthia

Re: Sending an email to an email address that contains an ampersand

ChrisHemedinger — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:55:19 GMT

I think that there are several systems that have problems processing an email address with an ampersand. In this case the problem could be SAS or your email SMTP server.

Usually such addresses are actually aliases for another address that won't have the special character. Any chance that your recipient can supply you with that?

Re: Sending an email to an email address that contains an ampersand

Sajid01 — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:59:25 GMT

This depends on the policy of the outgoing mail server and the mail server at the receiving end.
So more than the SAS code it is the mail server policy. As a first step consult your outgoing mail server administrator.