That should read winmail.dat btw
This is a starting point for resolving the problem, see the links at the bottom of the article:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
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Emails containing odd characters--Images appear as strings of numbers/letters
A friend has been received email messages from one source that clearly contain JPG attachments and these email messages, which used to look fine from this source (images displayed as images in the email, text was normal with no odd characters interspersed), have strange characters inserted within the text part of the message, and the image file appears as a string of letter and numbers in a long stack. I am attaching here the email she sent to me so you can see what she sees. Any idea what could cause this problem? Is it at her end (her email server, or her email client, which is Eudora 7.1) or theirs? Any help is most appreciated.
potterjazz
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Answers
moorhouselondon: I'm going to check with my friend to see about spam filtering and the method of receipt she is using, since I already know that others are receiving email from the same source *without* any such difficulties in viewing it. I'm also attaching the file I meant to attach originally (the file I originally thought I had uploaded was not one of the ones allowed for upload). Perhaps that will give you further clues. Thanks for your help.
potterjazz
Thanks for attaching the text, the formatting is much as I thought. However, I think there is a big clue in there as to what might be going on. There is a Spam appliance being used - it's an Ironport. My initial thought would be to bypass this if possible and see whether the problem persists - look for the Ironport header in the message will tell you whether it (the message) has been parsed through the appliance or not.
What I think is happening is that there is an unexpected character sequence in the email which is causing the "boundaries" of one of the parts of the message to be not correctly interpreted as part of the "structure" of the message, and it is being interpreted as part of the "content" of the message. The parser of the message is unable to find the structural boundary in the stream of characters and is thus treating everything as "content".
When sending the message, try reducing the options that the recipient needs to be able to handle. For instance, if there's an option to send in Plain Text only, use that rather than allowing it to be sent as a message that contains HTML tags.
Once these settings have been established, try sending a message, together with an attachment, from scratch - don't use the failed ones as a starting point.
I was unable to get the person whom I was advising to run the checks necessary to settle which of the various excellent alternative explanations for the difficulty was the right one. Moorehouselondon was thorough, prompt, and informative and should get credit even though I'm not to this moment sure which of his/her proposals was the correct solution.
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by: moorhouselondonPosted on 2009-10-11 at 11:46:17ID: 25546876
The file wasm't attached, but I would guess what is being seen is the MIME encoding of the jpg file.
If all other people can receive attachments ok from this sender then the problem is in one of two places (1) if the recipient has some form of Spam filtering appliance then it's possible that this is corrupting the email on the way through. (2) the recipient's email is not correctly configured, try changing the method of receipt: there should be options such as receiving in plain-text or html formats.
If not everyone can receive attachments satisfactorily from this sender then: if the sender is running Exchange then it may need some tweaking at the sender end. Do a Google search for TNEF or winmnail.dat.