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Pegasus Mail & Mercury » Mercury Mail Transport System » Mercury Community Support » Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

Last post 09-16-2008, 15:46 by Peter Strömblad. 7 replies.


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08-19-2008, 20:59

Gordon
Joined on 05-08-2007
Points 300

Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

Hi All,

I have a customer who sometimes gets emails into Outlook 2003 that have no body shown. I have copied the text of the .cnm file and pasted it into a new .cnm and droped it into my mailbox on my server and collect it using Outlook 2007 and it is shown fine.

The problem emails seem to come from specific sources but not all emails from these sources exhibit the problem. I have looked at the .cnm files and have noticed that they all seem to be UTF-8 Base64 and don't have a "NextPart" line (this may be normal for this type of email - I'm not an expert!!)

With the small sample I have seen, I noticed that the encoded body of the good email ended with "==". non of the apparently blank ones did.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Gordon

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08-19-2008, 23:14

Peter Strömblad
Joined on 01-30-2007
Sweden
Points 11,760

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

multipart mime messages should have a boundery, like ---part1---- bla bla bla ----part1----

It is not like XML or XHTML, that has a clear begin tag and a closing tag, like <begin> bla bla bla </begin>

So, in short you have to investigate the messages, according to the MIME spec (readable at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME) and notify the senders, if they are as you say rather specific, that their sending system violate the MIME standard - unless you find within your session logs, or the like that you in fact alter the inbound messages.

Kind regards / Peter

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08-20-2008, 13:42

Gordon
Joined on 05-08-2007
Points 300

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

Thanks Peter I'll check them out as you suggest.

Cheers, Gordon

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09-15-2008, 14:57

draders
Joined on 09-15-2008
Points 100

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

I have the same issue with utf-8 multipart emails, double newlines \n\n seem to be converted to jsut one \n which makes it not display.

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09-15-2008, 16:21

Peter Strömblad
Joined on 01-30-2007
Sweden
Points 11,760

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

I know some mac clients experience this, and maybe you're on the track here.

Could you provide a sample cnm here? // cut out sensitive parts or replace them with xxxx.

As an editing tip, if you use the advanced editor here, write the text you like, then click the HTML button, insert the tags <PRE> and </PRE> and copy your .cnm mass there - and it will look better when viewed - however not in the editor (among one of the few things I'd like to fix here... sigh)

Kind regards / Peter

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09-15-2008, 18:49

draders
Joined on 09-15-2008
Points 100

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: 1L2EHWT.CNM392F0993
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Received: from spooler by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.52); 15 Sep 2008 08:22:03 -0400
X-Envelope-To: <newuser@localhost.org>
Return-path: <admin@xxxx.ca>
Received: from irc-go (127.0.0.1) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.52) ID MG000011;
15 Sep 2008 08:21:53 -0400
Subject: =?UTF-8?B?UGFydHl0b3duIFN1YnNjcmlwdGlvbiBDb25maXJtYXRpb24u?=
From: admin@xxxx.ca
To: newuser@localhost.org
Return-to: admin@xxxx.ca
X-Priority: 3
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:21:53
Message-ID: <id_76bf6d7009ecffb06a15f0e7e8fb4f5f>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="491e50aa762f0a25d3714388dc4d346b"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
If you are reading this, consider upgrading your email client to a MIME-compatible client.
--491e50aa762f0a25d3714388dc4d346b
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
XXXX
--491e50aa762f0a25d3714388dc4d346b
Content-Type: text/HTML; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
</head>
<body>
XXXX
</body>
</html>
--491e50aa762f0a25d3714388dc4d346b--

I am using Thunderbird, though the same thing happened with Outlook as well, not sure about pegasus. Saved as a .eml file, not sure if that is the same as cnm. I'm also running Win XP. I also tried using \r\n\r\n instead, but that didn't change anything.

When I send the email, there is normally 2 \n after "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" and "Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="491e50aa762f0a25d3714388dc4d346b"", the received has one, adding another in and opening it will display the email fine.

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09-15-2008, 20:45

Rolf Lindby
Joined on 05-08-2007
Stockholm, Sweden
Points 9,455

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

A multipart MIME message is basically expected to look this way (quoted from RFC 1341):

From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@bellcore.com>
To: Ned Freed <ned@innosoft.com>
Subject: Sample message
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="simple
boundary"

This is the preamble. It is to be ignored, though it
is a handy place for mail composers to include an
explanatory note to non-MIME compliant readers.
--simple boundary

This is implicitly typed plain ASCII text.
It does NOT end with a linebreak.
--simple boundary
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

This is explicitly typed plain ASCII text.
It DOES end with a linebreak.

--simple boundary--
This is the epilogue. It is also to be ignored.

So in most cases there must be two CRLFs between headers and body, and before a boundary.

When working in a Windows environment it's advisable to always use CRLF (rather than just LF) when composing the message, as that is the Windows standard as well as the SMTP requirement.

You can use a session log in MercuryS to verify that the message received by Mercury follows these rules.

/Rolf

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09-16-2008, 15:46

Peter Strömblad
Joined on 01-30-2007
Sweden
Points 11,760

Re: Blank received emails to Outlook 2003

Acording to RFC 2049 appendix B, pt 7 and 8, it clearly states that to be MIME conformant, the BNF must be preceeded by CRLF, as part of the BNF itself.

That said, Mercury could possibly be made more "tolerant" in this respect.

Kind regards / Peter