<snip>
I was wondering if anyone's had an issue where an HTML message being recieved by an Imail user through POP3 exhibited any modifications to the HTML in the message.
More specifically, I have a customer on my Imail server(running version 6.06) who sends out HTML email ads. When they have the ad sent to their email address(for quality testing or whatever) on my Imail server(and apparently other Imail servers as well as they mentioned). The HTML will sometimes be altered in the form of an added period which usually shows up in an Image tag. The placing seems to be numerically random(based on where it happens in the document), but consistent within the same message if sent again(happens in the same place). This is where it gets wierd, though. When you view the same message through the web interface, the HTML is unmodified and works fine. It only seems to happen when downloading the message through POP. I've tried other POP clients and I've verified it happens on other Imail servers. I've seen it happen in 2 different documents that I recieved during testing with my client.
My client tells me that the HTML has been optimized for MacMail users just in case that might have something to do with it. Their target audience is the Mac user market, I believe.
</snip>
Just a wild guess, but the <quote>an added period</quote> remark in your post
reminded me of the following section in the smtp rfc which i just happened to
have reread:
<snip from rfc 2821\3.3> SMTP indicates the end of the mail data by sending a line containing only a "." (period or full stop). A transparency procedure is used to prevent this from interfering with the user's text (see section 4.5.2). </snip>
<snip from rfc 2821\4.5.2> Without some provision for data transparency, the character sequence "<CRLF>.<CRLF>" ends the mail text and cannot be sent by the user. In general, users are not aware of such "forbidden" sequences. To allow all user composed text to be transmitted transparently, the following procedures are used:
- Before sending a line of mail text, the SMTP client checks the first character of the line. If it is a period, one additional period is inserted at the beginning of the line.
- When a line of mail text is received by the SMTP server, it checks the line. If the line is composed of a single period, it is treated as the end of mail indicator. If the first character is a period and there are other characters on the line, the first character is deleted. </snip>
Perhaps if you look at the html of the message in question, you will find some lines beginning with periods, or some lines containing only one period........
Maurits
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