Entry

Why does Outlook 2000 stop parsing headers sometimes after they've been through ofmipd?

Why does Outlook 2000 sometimes screw up attachments?

Nov 15th, 2000 21:32
Brian Coogan,

Under some situations, when an email is sent to a non-qualified address 
("brianc" as opposed to "brianc@osa.com") the address has a null 
description (" ", ie quote space quote) added to it somewhere in the 
qmail chain of events (we suspect ofmipd to be the culprit), that is:
	To: brianc
becomes:
	To: " " <brianc@osa.com>
I don't pretend to know whether this qmail behaviour is fully correct 
or ideal or not; however Outlook 2000 assumes that this is an error in 
the email headers, thus dutifully stopping processing them and then 
pushing the remaining headers into the body of the email message as 
text.  This of course neatly breaks attachment parsing, although the 
message itself remains intact.  Additionally, while Outlook 2000 cannot 
parse the quoted space description, Outlook 98 appears to parse it 
correctly (apparently a different code base).  Note that Outlook 2000 
itself will not trigger this bug as it will not generate non-fully-
qualified addresses, the problem occurs only when people send email 
from older MUAs such as Pegasus.  ie:  Pegasus user sends email 
to "fred" -->  qmail adds null description --> Outlook 2000 barfs on 
reception.
I've reported this to Microsoft, and no fix has been promised despite 
the fact that they acknowledge it is a step backwards from Outlook 98 
behaviour.
We use qmail 1.03, fastforward, ofmipd, and have installed the 
qmailqueue patch hooks (usually in qmail-smtpd, but we also added it to 
ofmipd).  We are currently fixing the null description problem quite 
nicely with a perl script which converts the " " <u@d> to "u@d" <u@d> 
which works via the qmail-queue patch hooks.  I beleive our fastforward 
and ofmipd versions are either the latest or next-to-latest.  We 
confirmed this behaviour to be caused (partly) by ofmipd by removing 
ofmipd, which removed the problem.  This has been reported to the qmail 
powers that be.
In case this is all greek, if this is happening to you the typical 
sympton is that you see some of the header lines pushed into the body 
of the email message in Outlook when you display the message.  
Attachments also appear as MIME "gibberish".
I searched the mailing list archives and didn't come up with anything 
looking like the same problem; would love to hear from people with the 
same problem who this helps.