"Url not verified" from links in emails

[P3]

Hi,

There currently is a problem with redirections from links inside a newsletter made via the D&D composer. When inserting an external link, it ends up in with only Url not verified. However, internal links (ie links to pages inside the site) seem to work fine. In-text link do not work, and neither does the built-in social medias footer, except for the youtube one, which redirects correctly.

This is apparently a known issue. Is there a way to fix this? Or a workaround?

Additionally, I am using the Sendgrid plugin.

Thank you.

[Stefano]

Every link is signed to avoid the use of the redirection to do phishing, but your link should be verified. Are you experiencing this from a real newsletter or a test newsletter? When that error message is shown (it does not depend on the kind of composer used) it means the signing key is empty or has been changed.

You can find it on reports panel. Do you remember some kind of change that could have changed the key?

Stefano.

[P3]

Hi,

It was a newsletter sent via the ‘Test’ button, to test subscriber.

The signing key is being changed, but I am unsure by what, and why something it works and sometime does not. I think it might be linked to Sendgrid’s tracking, but cannot affirm it.

In the email itself, its a link toward sendgrid (for tracking purpose), which then redirects to the website. But when redirected to the site, the url is not valid anymore : https://www.mywebsite.com/?nltr=(key)%253D%253D.

One or two %253D are being appended to the url, but when deleted, then I am properly redirected to the correct website.

When I look in the email’s link, it ends with (key)-3D. %25 is ‘%’ , %2D is ‘-‘ and %3D is ‘=’. I do not know if its purely coincidental, but it seems that the url encoding and decoding is broken somewhere along the way, maybe by Sendgrid’s redirect.

While at this point a solution could be made (checking url for nltr param, then checking for a % in the string, then cutting it off if found), it would pretty hack-y and not very clean/good practice. And if sendgrid or the plugin were to change, it would most likely break.

Ideally, it would be best to simply have the proper url in the first place.

At this point, would you be able to provide further help concerning this issue ? Or is it strictly on Sendgrid’s side?

Thank you

Edit: After disabling sendgrid, it is not an issue with it, as the url is still invalid. So, its the generated url that has data appended to it that breaks it.

[P3]

Upon further testing, it seems that its being wrongly url-encoded along the way, but where, by what and why is unclear.

The link goes like this : (key)%253D%253D
As %25 is is ‘%’, it becomes : (key)%3D%3D <- this works
As %3D is ‘=’, it becomes (key)== <- this works

Actually, in the plugin, the line
$parts = explode(‘;’, base64_decode($_GET[‘nltr’]));
from statistics.php could be changed to
$parts = explode(‘;’, base64_decode(urldecode($_GET[‘nltr’])));

Which would mean it would be interpreted as %3D%3D, and as said, this works. And as far as I am aware, while this seems to be an external problem from the plugin, adding this should not break in any case, while solving some edge cases.

[Author]

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