Question

Why does a malformed email address, such as one containing a double full stop at the end, appear in a Segment event payload and the user profile in Engage, and subsequently cause errors in downstream tools like Braze?

Product

Twilio Segment

Environment

Segment Console

Answer

Malformed email addresses in event payloads can occur if invisible Unicode control characters or extra punctuation are introduced when copying and pasting email addresses from sources like word processors, email clients, or web pages. 

Segment does not modify or sanitize event property values, so any formatting issues present in the original payload will be stored and forwarded to Engage spaces and downstream destinations. This can result in errors if the destination system enforces stricter email validation.

Additional Information 

• To prevent such issues, ensure that email addresses are validated and sanitized before sending them to Segment.
• Be cautious when copying data from sources that may introduce hidden characters, especially when working with internationalized text or right-to-left languages.