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Resolving Newsletter Emoji Issues in WordPress

10 threads Sep 10, 2025 Plugin → Newsletter – send awesome emails from wordpress

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If you've ever tried to add an emoji to your newsletter in the 'Newsletter – Send awesome emails from WordPress' plugin, only to have it break or fail to save, you're not alone. This is a common issue tied to how WordPress and your database handle these special characters. This guide will explain why it happens and walk you through the most effective solutions.

Why Do Emoji Cause Problems?

Emoji are special Unicode characters that require a modern database charset called utf8mb4 to be stored correctly. Many older WordPress installations use an older charset, utf8, which cannot store emoji and can cause errors when the plugin tries to save your newsletter content.

As explained by the plugin's team in a release announcement, the plugin saves your newsletter message "as is." If your database tables are not configured to support these characters, the save process can fail.

How to Fix Emoji Saving Issues

Solution 1: Convert Your Database Tables (Recommended)

The most robust, permanent fix is to convert your Newsletter plugin tables to the utf8mb4 charset. Fortunately, the plugin provides a tool for this.

  1. Navigate to the Newsletter plugin's Status panel in your WordPress admin area.
  2. Look for a button to convert the Newsletter tables to the utf8mb4 charset.
  3. Click the button to run the conversion. This will allow your database to properly store emoji and prevent future errors.

Note: The plugin team has stated they do not force this conversion automatically to maintain compatibility, so this is a manual step you may need to take.

Solution 2: Check for Conflicting Security Rules (mod_security)

In some cases, the act of saving content with emoji can be incorrectly flagged and blocked by server-level security software like mod_security.

If you suspect this is the issue (often indicated by a generic blocking message or a 403 error), and Solution 1 does not work, you may need to contact your web hosting provider. You can ask them to check their mod_security rules for "false positives" related to the Newsletter plugin. The plugin's team has previously released beta versions to address such conflicts, which are typically included in stable releases later.

Solution 3: Verify Your WordPress & Database Environment

This fix is designed for websites running on a modern hosting environment. Ensure your WordPress installation and MySQL database are updated and actually support the utf8mb4 charset. Most recent hosting providers support this by default.

Need More Help?

If you continue to experience issues after trying these steps, the problem could be specific to your site's configuration. For further debugging, you may need to provide specific error messages from your WordPress debug log.

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