On occasion, when sending Japanese text (double byte character set) to an Exchange Server, the recipent receives each line of the message as an attachment. I think this has something to do with the Japanese character set; however, I’m not sure if this problem is on my side or on the Exchange side. Before I upgraded to ND6.0.1, I was using 4.6.7a and never had this problem so I tend to believe this is on my side. Has anyone else seen anything like this? Any suggestions?
Subject: SMTP Mail - Convert Text To Attachments (Japanese)
are you sending Notes Rich Text format or MIME format mail to internet addresses? (see your current location’s Mail tab for this setting.)
what mail client is the recipient using to read the email? can the recipient give you the message ‘stream’? (getting the stream varies greatly depending upon the client in use.)
can you capture the message stream as domino sends it over smtp? if you have access to the server, you can set the ini parameter SMTPSaveOutboundToFile=1 in the server’s notes.ini file. this will cause the smtp client to save everything it sends out in a file name of the form stNNNNNN.TMP, where ‘NNNNNN’ is a random six digit number. the smtp client will log the actual filename on the server console.
if you set this up, run a test again and grab the saved stream, then set SMTPSaveToOutboundFile=0 to conserve disk space <-8. if you attach one or both streams to a response here, we can take a quick look…
pwl
ibm m&c
Subject: RE: SMTP Mail - Convert Text To Attachments (Japanese)
By deault users are sending as ‘Rich Text Format’. Should I change this setting to ‘MIME’?
The receipent is using Microsoft Outlook.
As far as saving the SMTP stream on the Notes server, I was thinking to do this; however, the problem only happens once per week on average so I would need to prune that log directory quite frequently.
If you have any suggestions on any other settings (or should I change the Rich Text to MIME) I would greatly appreicate them. Thanks for the help!
Subject: Yes. Change to Mime format for outbound Internet mail.
Subject: changing to mime format is A Good Thing but…
…it may not completely solve this particular problem although it may make it happen even less frequently, if it’s what i suspect.
details:
this problem sounds similar to one we were seeing during n/d 6 development: messages sent to recipients who used an exchange server were being delivered with all text parts turned into attachments; not Ultra-Friendly.
after much digging, it turned out that the senders were sending notes rich text to internet addresses and the server configuration was set to convert notes rich text ‘from Notes to Plain Text and HTML’. then, when the message also contaiined images and at least one attachment, the converter created a message with this structure like this (for example):
multipart/mixed
multipart/related
multipart/alternative
text/plain
text/html
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
application/octet-stream
exchange 4 and 5 servers didn’t handle this very well, turning all text parts into attachments. (i don’t have a link to a definitive microsoft support article on this problem handy, but you can google for this info; that’s how i found it.) there is a patch available for exchange 4/5 servers and the problem is supposed to be fixed in exchange 5.5 … but it’s also clear that not everyone is conscientious about getting and applying patches.
in the interest of interoperability and in conformance with the internet mail credo of ‘be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept’, we changed the default setting for the converter from ‘from Notes to Plain Text and HTML’ to ‘from Notes to Plain Text’, which made the converter’s behavior equivalent to the n/d 5 behavior.
so – you can check your server Confiuration Settings doc to see how the converter is configured in this respect; in the Configuration Settings doc, see the MIME page, Conversion Options, Outbound, Message content setting. if it’s set to convert notes rich text ‘from Notes to Plain Text and HTML’, then that’s very likely the cause of the problem. if not, then i dunno.
if this is the problem, simply changing your location to send mime to internet addresses will usually work as most people don’t send plain text and html text within the message, just one or the other. however, if you send plain and html text, the client will sometimes send messages with structures similar to one outlined above and your correspondents may still see the problem.
fnially, if the problem is unrelated to everything above, then it’s a new one on me. if you think that’s the case, then please report the issue through support and we can work it from there.
pwl
ibm m&c
Subject: RE: changing to mime format is A Good Thing but…
What are your settings for “Attachment encoding method” on that same page? For outbound message options under ‘settings by character set groups’, are you doing body encoding for multi-languages or just header?
Thanks …
Subject: RE: changing to mime format is A Good Thing but…
I checked my server configuration document for the coversion options and I am already set as ‘From Notes To Plain Text’ so that is not the case. I greatly appreicate your advise however …If you have a chance, can you post that url to where Microsoft makes some sort of reference about this issue? I did some searches but I was unable to find anything.
Is there anything else that you can think of that might be causing this or that could be adjusted on my side to prevent it?
Thanks for the help!
Subject: Yeah, but on outbound mail, your Location doc controls the setting
On the Mail tab
Format for messages addressed to internet addresses:
MIME Format
If you leave it Rich Text, then the server has to do the work of converting to Mime/Plain Text.