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!

In article <1162172094.005719.211880@e64g2000cwd.googlegroups .com>
SireBelch@gmail.com writes:
>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.

And from this you conclude that somethng changed between sendmail
8.12.11 and 8.13.1, and then changed back again in 8.13.3 - rather than
that there is something different with your RH AS4.0?

>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),

And you *still* think it's a sendmail issue?:-)

> 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.

MTAs are not supposed to set character set encodings, that's for the MUA
to do - i.e. in your case probably the "e-mail list dispatching
program". I would guess from your description that in the cases where
you have problems, something on the way to from the user to the MTA
turns the "extended ascii" characters into utf-8, whereas before they
were left as-is. Sendmail doesn't care much either way, but the
recipients can't make sense of the utf-8 when it isn't labeled as such.

>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.

So again, everything points to an OS "issue". I believe that looking
into the locale settings of the environment where your mailer program
runs may be useful - i.e. LANG and LC_* settings, and possibly also
settings for the terminal emulator where the "pasting" happens. But
either way your mailer program should pass a complete message to
sendmail, including any MIME headers needed to properly declare the body
contents.

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org

> And from this you conclude that somethng changed between sendmail
> 8.12.11 and 8.13.1, and then changed back again in 8.13.3 - rather than
> that there is something different with your RH AS4.0?

No, not at all. I only included that information to show that I did not
think it was somehow binary or version related, but was instead some
kind of configuration change between OS's and OS versions - a
configuration change that I can't seem to locate.

> So again, everything points to an OS "issue". I believe that looking
> into the locale settings of the environment where your mailer program
> runs may be useful - i.e. LANG and LC_* settings, and possibly also
> settings for the terminal emulator where the "pasting" happens. But
> either way your mailer program should pass a complete message to
> sendmail, including any MIME headers needed to properly declare the body
> contents.
>
> --Per Hedeland
> per@hedeland.org

I'll check the environment variables and see if that makes any
difference. Thank you for your assistance!

After checking and resetting environment variables, I discovered that
the freebsd machine that worked ok without any odd characters didn't
actually have a LANG default set at all in its enviroment. The old
redhat machine had us-en. The newer machine had us-en,UTF-8 set as the
LANG environment variable. Changing it to plain us-en had no effect
unfortunately.

The e-mail dispatches still have garbled output. I know it's because
the word processing software that people are using are converting
normal " and ' and ... characters to ascii characters with values above
127.

It's just so puzzling that some OS environments correctly reinterpret
them to quotes and apostrophes, and other OS environments convert them
to the strance cyrillic characters.

At first glance, the sendmail.cf files look very similar. I just don't
get it.




SireBelch@gmail.com wrote:
> > And from this you conclude that somethng changed between sendmail
> > 8.12.11 and 8.13.1, and then changed back again in 8.13.3 - rather than
> > that there is something different with your RH AS4.0?
>
> No, not at all. I only included that information to show that I did not
> think it was somehow binary or version related, but was instead some
> kind of configuration change between OS's and OS versions - a
> configuration change that I can't seem to locate.
>
> > So again, everything points to an OS "issue". I believe that looking
> > into the locale settings of the environment where your mailer program
> > runs may be useful - i.e. LANG and LC_* settings, and possibly also
> > settings for the terminal emulator where the "pasting" happens. But
> > either way your mailer program should pass a complete message to
> > sendmail, including any MIME headers needed to properly declare the body
> > contents.
> >
> > --Per Hedeland
> > per@hedeland.org
>
> I'll check the environment variables and see if that makes any
> difference. Thank you for your assistance!