At 09:51 -0800 2009/01/12, Joey K Tuttle wrote: >Is anyone else suffering scrambled messages?
At 09:55 -0800 2009/01/12, Roger Hui wrote: >All recent J Forum msgs look fine to me. >Perhaps "Mailman" is suffering the pre Jan 20 blues. At 10:56 +0800 2009/01/13, bill lam wrote: >Did you see something like this? > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 >Sender: [email protected] >Errors-To: [email protected] > >VGhpcyB3b3JrZWQgYmV0dGVyIHdoZW4gdGhlIG51bWJlcnMgd2VyZSA1LjcgYW5kIDQuNyBhcyBp >dCBhY3R1YWxseSB3YXMgaW4KdGhlIG9yaWdpbmFsCiAgNS43MCA0LjcwICUgMiAyICQgMyA1IDUg >MwogMS45ICAgICAgICAgICAgIDEuMTQKMC45NCAxLjU2NjY2NjY2NjY2NjY3CiAgQj06NS43MCA0 > > >That belongs to bjorn's message, his signature is an attachment >containing 8-bit characters, so that base64 encoding is used. iirc >that filter is always running in J forum mailman albeit version may be >different. Which email client do you use? I guess you can fix it by >tuning your email client. At 23:29 -0800 2009/01/13, Joey K Tuttle wrote: >No, it wasn't base64 encoding, just missing line ends etc. making >quite a mess of the messages. It happened in 3 different mail clients >(Eudora, iPod, and Applemail) as well as in Unix "mail" (or even in >vi of the mail still in the mail server...) > >Whatever was causing it seems to not be a problem today - so I >guess/home it was temporary. Some of your messages were affected in >this way. Today, a series of messages (that I wanted to read) were unreadable because of the problems discussed above. I decided it was time to work harder at figuring out what was amiss. When I looked more carefully, the thing in common between all the screwed up messages was that they came from [email protected]. Looking further, it seems that gmail encodes many (but not all) outgoing messages as Base64 inline data. Then sendmail on my server is running a filter which removes the line: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 and inserts the two lines such as: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from base64 to 8bit by focus.qued.com id n0VDVsl1002139 I was able to get a clear picture of this by capturing a copy of a particular message (one from [email protected] to jforum chat) in raw qf... and df... parts as it appeared in spool/mqueue - BEFORE the header and body were put back together (with corrupted data) and appended to my inbox by sendmail on the mail server. One justification for talking about all this in a jforum is that it was j code that let me capture the bits of the mail, and it is j code that I use to decode base64 data and reassemble the header and body parts into an email message. The messages built by my j code look fine when read by clients - but the "official" sendmail version has all the new-line characters stripped out of the base64 content... Mind you, Bill Lam's Chinese signature is passed through just fine, but all the line ends are missing (making quite a mess of his messages). Maybe I can find a way to cause sendmail to not transform the content. All of my mail clients (except Unix mail) are happy to decode the base64 content correctly. If anyone knows of a way to dissuade sendmail from decoding the content, please let me know. Meanwhile, I think it is interesting to use j to chase down rather low level inconsistencies/bugs in Linux/Unix programs... - joey ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
