We battled this a lot with Mailman. If recall correctly part of the problem *was* the file extension. The receiving servers treated them as text when they should have treated them as binary... multiple problems ensued.
The problem was made worse by multipart mime encoding/decoding, which some servers did one way, while *others* went their own way totally ignoring any kind of standards. The first step is to pick a nice extension that Mail servers will respect and leave alone. Try that out and see if it helps! Good Luck - Jon Carnes On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 11:41, Christopher L Merrill wrote: > I guess this is OT, since OUR servers (BSD and Linux) do NOT have this > problem. We send out license keys to our customers via email. The keys > are encrypted files (i.e. binary). We've always received reports of the > license keys arriving corrupted. But the reports are becoming more and > more frequent. When we zip the key and resend it (manually), the keys > always get through. > > Firstly, I don't understand why the servers are corrupting any attachments. > I could understand if they were simply stripped...by malware filters, for > instance. > > I surmise that if the servers were actually inspecting the contents of > the files, both look like binary files, so both should get munged. But > since only the non-.zip files get munged, the servers are looking at > either the first few bytes to identify Zip files (PK...) or they are > looking at the file extensions. Since I've heard people recommend > renaming files to *.zip to get past mail filters, I suspect that some > or all of these servers are looking at file extensions. > > > So finally...my questions: > > Is it common for mail servers or malware scanners to use the filename > extension to determine the attachment type? > > If we simply renamed our licence keys to *.zip, would we cut down the > frequency of our corrupted key compaints? > > Any other suggestions? > > > TIA, > C > > > > -- > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Chris Merrill | http://www.webperformanceinc.com > Web Performance Inc. > > Website Load Testing and Stress Testing Software > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
