I've spent the past 2 days googling and experimenting with my
sendmail.cf files, and I continue to be stumped.

I have a few different boxes that run sendmail. The old RedHat AS2.1
(based on redhat 7) as well as all my freebsd boxes seem to work just
fine. The Redhat box runs 8.12.11. The freebsd box runs 8.13.3. Both of
these work fine.

Then, there are the ones I have trouble with, both running redhat AS4.0
with sendmail 8.13.1.

Here's my issue.

I have an e-mail list dispatching program which our client uses to send
messages to their staff. They create html email messages in Microsoft
Word, save them as HTML, and then copy and paste the source into the
mailer for html-email dispatch.

On the old Red Hat machine and the new freebsd machine, this works
wonderfully. However on the new redhat machine (as well as a recently
tried ubuntu box running postfix), the extended ascii characters that
Microsoft Word uses turn to gibberish. Examples of this are the
italicized left and right quote marks instead of plain old
shift-apostrophe quote marks - those get converted to junk like a
lowercase-a with a carat mark, then a euro sign, then a square box.
Spaces get converted to uppercase A's with a carat on top. Some
apostrophes turn into a-with-carat, euro sign, TM symbol.

While I'm somewhat dense about sendmail configuration, I was able to
figure out that this clearly had something to do with the character set
encoding that was (or wasn't) being set by my MTA.

While the finger could be pointed at the mailer program and/or the
filthy HTML that Microsoft Word generates, the fact is that on the old
RedHat box and the new freebsd boxes, the e-mail dispatch blasts out
just fine with no stray characters - while on the new redhat boxes
(some of which running OLDER versions of sendmail than the freebsd
system) the email becomes trashy.

I've checked the usual suspects in the config files on all machines,
and they all seem to match.

# strip message body to 7 bits on input?
O SevenBitInput=False
# 8-bit data handling
O EightBitMode=pass8
# default character set
O DefaultCharSet=iso-8859-1

Changing these has no real effect on my problem throughout any of the
machines.

In the meantime, I've written a tiny exe that will read in the HTML
file and output a stripped-down version converting anything over ascii
128 to its loose-lower-ascii equivalent, but this is only a short-term
remedy. I need Sendmail to do this dirtywork for me on the new redhat
OS the way that it did on the old red hat, and the way it does on the
new FreeBSD machines.


Here's an example of the junk I'm being sent (assuming ggroups posts
properly):

           We tried every connection, even tried
to hire a private jet to take us closer and tried to rent a helicopter.
I kept telling Doris that she needed to fake a heart attack so we could
get a medical chopper…she just said, “I think I am having a
heart attach and I’m not faking.� But we still
couldn’t get there on time.


Can someone offer me any clues?

As they say... TIA!