Hello,

I am currently using an RTE (Reliable Transaction Engine) to send
emails containing attachments to users. Although the emails get
displayed correctly in "heavy" mail clients such as Lotus Notes, Apple
Mail, etc., they don't in "light" mail clients such as Web mail
clients: the MIME types and subtypes and the attachments' bodies get
displayed as raw text in the body of the email, like this:

-----112222
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="1222.txt"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: Text/Plain


22 09 06;Ssdkedkdkd; MR. JOHNSON; AAA
22 09 06;XXXCCcccc; MRS. JOHES; BBB
....

If I "cat" a similar message containing an attachment to sendmail (cat
my_message.txt | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -bm -v), my Web mail client
correctly displays the corresponding email; that is, the attachment is
shown as an icon, as one would expect.

So here's my questions: have any of you ever had this problem before?
How I can make sendmail keep a copy in a directory of the emails sent
by my RTE, for later debugging? If the attached file contained weird
characters which might cause the Web client to choke on the message,
would sendmail tell me so in the logs?

Many thanks.

phiroc

phiroc wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am currently using an RTE (Reliable Transaction Engine) to send
> emails containing attachments to users. Although the emails get
> displayed correctly in "heavy" mail clients such as Lotus Notes, Apple
> Mail, etc., they don't in "light" mail clients such as Web mail
> clients: the MIME types and subtypes and the attachments' bodies get
> displayed as raw text in the body of the email, like this:
>
> -----112222
> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="1222.txt"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> Content-Type: Text/Plain
>
>
> 22 09 06;Ssdkedkdkd; MR. JOHNSON; AAA
> 22 09 06;XXXCCcccc; MRS. JOHES; BBB
> ...
>
> If I "cat" a similar message containing an attachment to sendmail (cat
> my_message.txt | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -bm -v), my Web mail client
> correctly displays the corresponding email; that is, the attachment is
> shown as an icon, as one would expect.
>
> So here's my questions: have any of you ever had this problem before?
> How I can make sendmail keep a copy in a directory of the emails sent
> by my RTE, for later debugging? If the attached file contained weird

If you look on the client computer mail spool or inbox (possibly in the
/var/mail/ mbox file) you can see what the client sees, and compare it
to the result of the "cat" command. It is likely that the RTE isn't
creating a standard compliant attachment, but that some clients can
read it anyway. The heavy clients would be much older than the web
client, and might be more forgiving. Is the RTE failing to include a
"boundary" field in the "content-type" record?

Sendmail doesn't know about attachments, and just passes them through
as though they were part of a regular text message. It is up to the
client to interpret the content header and the message body.

Daniel Feenberg

> characters which might cause the Web client to choke on the message,
> would sendmail tell me so in the logs?
>
> Many thanks.
>
> phiroc