Sitecore EXM - issue with long name emails

 Sitecore EXM - emails with long names

Our customer is using Sitecore Email Experience Manager to send campaigns (e-mails) to their contacts.  We got notified that they had an issue with a specific campaign that was not sending. 

First of all we noticed that the email was completely blocked in the EXM management tool. We could not de-activate it to try to change anything which was pretty weird. Luckily the logs showed us some meaningful information.

ERROR Exception: Sitecore.Exceptions.InvalidItemNameException

Message: An item name lenght should be less or equal to 100.

Source: Sitecore.Kernel

   ....

   at Sitecore.EmailCampaign.Cm.Pipelines.DispatchNewsletter.DeployAnalytics.AddCampaignItem(MessageItem message)

 

An item name lenght should be less or equal to 100

Yes, item length - that is the issue. (including the typo in the exception message 😊)

But what item name? Yes, the name of the email was long, but not that long. EXM does check the length of the name - just try to type more than 100 characters in the name field of a new regular mail and it will turn red. 

Let's have another look at the trace in the error message - it seems to be from "AddCampaign" and that rings a bell. When a regular email is created, Sitecore also creates a campaign item in /sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/Campaigns. When we check the names of the items there it seems to be the name of the mail campaign with the item id (guid). This means that this item is 36 characters longer than the mail name - leaving us with only 64 characters for the mail name. 

Which is fine - if you know it. And yes, that should be checked in EXM. You can consider this a bug -it is- but I'm not going to patch a solution for it. 

Fix ?

We could try and patch it ourselves, but it's actually not worth the effort. We could also increase the MaxItemNameLength but again - don't seem worth it. Note that we are talking about the name of the mail campaign, not the subject or anything the end customer would see.

So we decided to just fix the impacted mail and inform the customer to use shorter names in future (until we move the solution to Sitecore Send 😛)

Fixing locked mail items

Fixing the item seemed to be not that easy actually as it was really locked. I could not deactivate it to edit it. An old trick to the rescue, described on Sitecore Stack Exchange (of course... ) in another situation but still very useful. 

Go to the content editor and locate the mail item. Unprotect it and make the changes you want - in this case shorten the title.  Protect the item again - use the "Open EXM" button to go to the item where you now can de-active and activate again.  And that should fix your mail.

Conclusion

One more reason to start moving the mail part of the solution to Send...