Gmail connector mis-encodes non-ASCII sender display name in From header

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened May 20, 2026 by vgbento Closed Jun 1, 2026

Summary

When sending an email through the Codex Desktop Gmail connector, a sender display name containing non-ASCII characters can be mis-encoded in the From header.

Example expected sender display name:

Example É User <user@example.com>

Example actual sender display name observed in Gmail sent mail:

"Example É User" <user@example.com>

The email body handles UTF-8 correctly. For example, the body can contain:

Example É User

But the sender display name in the message metadata/header is corrupted.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Configure a Gmail sender display name with a non-ASCII character, such as Example É User.
  2. In Codex Desktop, use the Gmail connector to send an email.
  3. Open the sent message in Gmail or read it back through the Gmail connector.
  4. The From display name appears mojibaked, for example Example É User, instead of preserving the original UTF-8 text.

Observed behavior

The From display name appears to be UTF-8 text interpreted as Latin-1/Windows-1252.

Example connector readback after sending:

from_: "\"Example É User\" user@example.com"
body: "Test message\n\nExample É User"

Expected behavior

The Gmail connector should preserve UTF-8 characters in the sender display name, so the sent message should show the configured non-ASCII display name correctly.

Notes

This was reproduced using Codex Desktop with the Gmail connector. The body content preserved the non-ASCII text correctly; only the sender display name/header path was affected.

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