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Garbled (?) e-mail

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by techstop

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Periodically, a user here will complain about e-mail that looks like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX will be noted.

That is, part of the message is obliterated with "Xs", and part makes it through.

In another situation, the message lookedokay, but contained a Microsoft Word attachment that was garbled. (That one throws me even more---the mail is well-formed enough to create a recognizable boundary which let's the system "see" it as a Word doc, but it's an unreadable Word doc?)

The mail system is pretty well the latest version of sendmail, but it has happened with older versions. The (POP3) mail clients are different versions of Microsoft Outlook, including 98, 2000, and XP.

Idears? (Points awarded to first idea thateither SOLVES the problem, or correctly IDENTIFIES the cause so that I can work out a solution myself.)

Thanks!!!

4 replies

by nikki96

Two ideas come to mind.
One - the MIME type is incorrectly set. MS mail products don't "guess" well.
Two - There is a .procmail file process involved mucking things up. unix/linux don't know how to handle word docs (and other application type files) by default. I've had my Word docs corrupted by being piped through Unix sendmail with .procmail when it tried to convert them to text.

by techstop

I found the problem and fix, and I'm posting it here in case anyone else needs the answer.

The network uses a Cisco PIX firewall. The version of software that was running the firewall had a bug which caused it to do this. The solution was to upgrade the firewall.

-- Rick Horowitz, MCSE, MCT, CCNA, LCP
TechStop Support Services

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