problem with "personalize the "To:" field"

[Martin Baker]

I'm calling campaignCreate and seeing that in the web interface that the personalize option for the created campaign is enabled and set to "*|FNAME|*" as the merge tag. This happens even if I set the 'to_name' to empty in the campaignCreate options.

Curiously if I do a popup preview of the created campaign then no first name is shown in the email header. Is this a bug in the web UI.

[jesse]

Create a campaign manually via the web interface - *|FNAME|* is the
default, so that first part is completely normal.

I see a ticket open for the second part - obviously that has nothing
to do with the API. Feel free to contact support about it if you wish.


jesse

[Martin Baker]

Why it would be normal for "Personalize to field" to be enabled and *|FNAME|* set as the merge tag if I've explicitly set it to an empty string from the API?

thanks

Martin

[Martin Baker]

I've just done a test and when the email is sent out, the first *|FNAME|* IS  sent out to the recipient. So the API call to set to empty string gets ignored.

[jesse]

I finally figured out what you are actually asking, which is "how do I
turn off using 'Personalize the To: field'?". I'm looking at what we
can do, but no changes will be made before next Monday.



jesse

[Martin Baker]

Thanks Jesse

In this situation, ff a subscriber's FNAME field is empty, will the "to name" be ignored anyway?

Martin

[jesse]

Not really, but you can make it happen:

http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-do-conditional-smart-merge-tags-work


jesse

[jesse]

Ugh, sorry, that is not relevant to what you asked - don't try to use
conditionals for the To field. Here's exactly what the To: header will
look like in that situation:

To: "" <te...@tester.com>

Most clients should then ignore that and display the email address,
though.


jesse

[Martin Baker]

I think what we'll have to do for now is just createCampaign through the API, then modify the campaign and send it manually.

thanks

Martin