Thanks Milan, for your help/suggestions! On Wed, 2016-02-17 at 09:49 +0100, Milan Crha wrote: > On Tue, 2016-02-16 at 22:25 +0000, Johnson, Brett E (HP Cloud Linux > R&D) wrote: > > I've noticed that, using evolution-ews, evolution almost always base64 > > -encodes > > the body of my messages. Yet, if I send the same message via SMTP, it is > > not > > encoded. > > Hi, > do you send exactly the same message using Evolution, once through an > evolution-ews account, another time using SMTP?
Yes. I sent two message via EWS (one just plain text, and the other with some minimal html italics/bold). Then I sent the same messages (using "Edit as new message") and selecting an evolution IMAP/SMTP account pointing at the same msexchange server (via the "From:" menu). The ones sent from the EWS account are both received as multipart/alternative MIME messages with base64 encoding. When sent from the IMAP/SMTP account, both are received also as multipart/alternative, but the parts are sent with 7bit ascii encoding. Finally, I composed the exact same message in OWA and sent it, and the result was the same as evolution/SMTP, except the encoding for the text/html part was "quoted-printable" instead of "7bit". > > > Can anyone explain this? Is there any way to turn it off? > > I do not think so. If the answer is 'yes' for my question above, then > it clearly means that it's not done by the message composer, because it > always produces the same result. I agree it's not done by the message composer. It must have something to do with the EWS transport, but I don't really understand that part. > > I really don't want to send out base64 encoded blobs to anyone > > Why does it matter for you? You see the base64 encoding only if you > check the message source. You're making the incorrect assumption that everyone uses a mail client that can transparently decode mime/base64. I need to be able to send plain text emails, especially in some circles/mailing lists where sending a non-plaintext email to the list will get you publicly shamed and even banished. > By the way, there are circumstances where base64 encoding is required. > For example if you encrypt the message. The encrypted part contains > binary data (not text), thus the encoding is required to not have > modified the data by respective servers on the route from the sender's > machine to the receiver's machine. Agreed, I understand this. I'm not complaining about using base64 when it's needed, only when it's not needed, and when I'm trying purposefully to send plain text. > If you want to debug what the evolution-ews does when it sends the > message, then run evolution from a terminal like this: > > $ EWS_DEBUG=2 evolution > > Then resend any message through the EWS account, once the initial buzz > will end. You should see in the output something like > <messages:CreateItem ... > (in time of the send) and inside it also > <Message><MimeContent>...</MimeContent> > The content of <MimeContent/> is the message as passed to the server, > encoded as base64 (that is required here, because the envelope is an > XML document). I sent a very simple message, which was Subject:test; in > body:test, and the decoded MimeContent showed: > Content-Type: text/plain > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > thus no base64 in the message itself at all. Thanks, I tried this, and when sending via EWS, I see the same thing you do. I.e. there's a base64 blob in between the <MimeContent></MimeContent> tags, and if I decode that blob, it's the same thing that I see in the message sent via SMTP. Bizarrely, what appears in the message sent via EWS is the two multipart/alternative parts, each base64 encoded separately. So, it's apparent that it's the msexchange server doing the encoding, not evolution. I wonder why it's doing that when sent this way, but not when sent via SMTP? > With respect of the Outlook, I do not know what version of Outlook you > use, neither what version of the Exchange server you connect to, but > since Exchange 2007, the servers can be connected through MAPI and EWS. In any > case, the debugging will show what is passed to the server. I think the outlook version is 2013, at least that's what the icon says. And I'm pretty sure it's connecting via EWS, not MAPI. In the account configuration, it has a bizarre-looking "server name" that looks like a UUID of some sort, and the "Connect to Exchange via HTTP" box is checked. I don't know what version of exchange is running in the galactic corp HQ. The debug output SOAP-ENV I generated above says: <types:RequestServerVersion xmlns:types="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types"; Version="Exchange2010_SP2"/> Is that a return from a query? Or is it the version evolution-ews supports? In any case, I don't really know where to go from here. Maybe it's a misconfiguration of the exchange server, or maybe there's something in the evolution-ews messages that makes exchange think it needs to encode the parts? -- Brett Johnson<[email protected]> "Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like." ~~ Paul Graham _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list [email protected] To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
