Unexpected characters within the email body

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powersg
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Aug 02, 2002 11:54 pm

Unexpected characters within the email body

Post by powersg »

I have been looking at an e-mail problem for days now, relating to unexpected characters within the e-mail body.

The Basic problem is two fold:
1. Additional characters appear within the e-mail body.
2. Lines have been wrapped at around 76 characters.

When viewing a message in notepad, launched from the MailEnable snap-in, the following character sequences now appear within the mail body (All sequences are single quoted):
'=20'
'=A' (appears instead of '£' character)
'3D'

Lines containing '=20' characters have usually been wrapped at around 76 characters.

I have not yet verified (Please, just don't ask! :cry: ) that the mailing engine is not introducing these faults. I am trying (been for days :evil:) to get a copy of the out going e-mail before it's passed to MailEnable.

The e-mail body consists of the usual to, from, subject and
[list]Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: eaDirect
X-Read: 1
[/list]
which I'm not particularly familiar with.

The body then continues with an HTML stream which is where the character corruption/ format starts. The original e-mail's template has html lines that span 76 over characters, so somewhere along the lines something is re-formatting it.

When the e-mail is viewed in WebMail the '=20' and '=A' sequences appear.

Has anybody seen this issue before or can suggest what may be going on. My brain hurts trying to get to the bottom of it all. I've even resorted to using ASCII tables sets in HEX and decimal to see if these character sequences is some form of encoding.

Thanks in advance, Steve P.

Note:The e-mail template/ corrupted e-mail can be provided by e-mail.[/list]
Steve Power

Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1127
Joined: Mon Jun 10, 2002 6:31 pm
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Post by Admin »

Thanks for the detail. We've found the problem (due to it not decoding quoted-printable messages of type text/html that had no MIME boundaries), and will post a fix shortly.

powersg
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Aug 02, 2002 11:54 pm

Post by powersg »

Oh excellent! :):)

I am being pressed by my management team to find out when a fix is likely to be available. Can you give an indication of when you think the patch will be available? Is it likely to be today/ next few days or are we talking weeks?

Should the e-mail body have "MIME boundaries" defined, if so can you suggest how this can be achieved?

Thanks in advanced, Steve Power (Very Happy Bunny)
Steve Power

powersg
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Aug 02, 2002 11:54 pm

Post by powersg »

Further to post above, I do require that this patch is made available asap.

My IBM management team and my Customers management team is instructing me to source an alternative soltuion to Mail Enable and have Mail Enable replaced asap. I would perfer to avoid this siutation.

Please feel free to contact me directly at powersg@uk.ibm.com to discuss.

Thanks.
Steve Power

MailEnable
Site Admin
Posts: 4441
Joined: Tue Jun 25, 2002 3:03 am
Location: Melbourne, Victoria Australia

Post by MailEnable »

The relevant details/fixes have been mailed to you - Appologies for the delay. The delay was in testing the patch.
Regards, Andrew

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