Rendered_Email_Velocity_Error_Area_?! error but no velocity scripting

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to send a sample of an email to test the rendering of a new template, and when I go to hit send on the sample, I get the following error:

I have no velocity scripting incorporated in this email. Even weirder? I tested the template in our sandbox instance and it worked just fine. Is this a glitch isolated to one instance? Is there something I'm missing?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Do you a velocity script defined either within the program that contains this email; or at a higher-up parent folder (that the email could potentially inherit)?  If so - and there's an issue with the script - we've encountered similar errors like this in the past.

[Anonymous]

No, unfortunately there is no velocity script defined anywhere in this workspace

[Keith_Nyberg2]

I agree with Dan's suggestion. Inherited tokens are probably the issue here.

[Anonymous]

There are no tokens, inherited or local, within this program.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You (as in, we) are always using Velocity when assembling emails, whether or not there are any user-created tokens! So it is possible to get such errors simply by having certain Velocity reserved character sequences in a regular email.

Look for the # and $ characters in particular. If you whittle down the HTML chances are you'll find one of these is the problem, and I can tell you how to fix it.

[Anonymous]

It's a modular template referencing variables like ${body_color} throughout the code, so there are a lot of those types of characters. However, is there a reason it would pick up an issue with those character sequences in one Marketo instance and not another? As I mentioned in my original post, this email template works perfectly fine in our Sandbox account. It's only in production that I am experiencing this error message.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not all instances are equal w/r/t Velocity, unfortunately. (Almost equal but we see quirks now and then.)

When you whittle down the email to the offending part, what's the variable/syntax that's causing it?

[Jared_Kimball2]

Hi Sanford,

I'm experiencing the exact same message for a handful of new templates we are trying to get deployed in Marketo.

We are able to code and save the templates, but whenever a marketing manager tries to save the template for a send it displays that exact message Abby mentioned.

I've looked through the code and we have thousands of # and a handful of $ symbols in the email template, but they all appear to be correct because they're referencing colors (#ffffff) or contain a Marketo variable ${button_color}.

Is there anything else I could look at regarding the variable/syntax that could be causing this issue? In other words I'm having a difficult time finding the offending part.

Thanks,

Jared

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you DM me we can look at it together offline. For this error, exchanging pastes/ideas here will become cumbersome. What makes it extra difficult is once an email throws this error Marketo can corrupt the email, continuing to throw the error even though the original offending line is no longer present.