Odd Attachment Problem

[chris505207]

Hi,

Got a strange attachment problem with one of my customers - 120 branch offices and a HQ.

Offices are connected through WAN.

Mail is routed through their HQ. Exchange 2003 servers with Net IQ Mail Marshall service scanning all email for viruses and spam on port:26 then passing mail to port:25.

Branch office clients have Outlook Express which use POP3 to get mail through our ISP.

When various senders from head office send an email to all branches with attachment. 99% of branches recieve email and attachment fine but the odd two or three get the email but no attachment.

Email size reads as though attachment is there!

This has been happening for the last three weeks. No config changes have been made to the Exchange orginization or Mail Marshall?

We have checked for Viruses, versions of Viruses software which are all the same at branches, firewalls, Outlook settings, ISP, Exchange, Mail Marshall to no avail!!

If have forwarded problem mail from affected branches to myself and there is no attachment present. Suggesting attachment is being stripped before reaching client.

HQ can resend same email later on and the problem branches will get attahcment fine. It's very random and effects different branches on and off.

Any help would be apprecitaed.

Many Thanks.

 

[Dillinger1999]

Hi
I have a similar problem here! Did you manage to sort it out?

TJ

 

[MikeBatters]

Have you tried applying SP2 as this has fixes which may well be relevant to this.

Mike

*************************************

Remember - There is always another way..........I just haven't found out what it is yet!

 

[markdmac]

Branch office clients have Outlook Express which use POP3 to get mail through our ISP.

Why are the branches using Outlook Express? Why don't you configure them to use Outlook 2003 in Cached Mode?

Cost is not an issue because you get a free Outlook 2003 license with every Exchange 2003 CAL.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[chris505207]

Thanks for the replies guys.

SP2 is already applied and branches use outlook express as the are all running Win98. Keeps it less app hungry.

Last week the ISP had a problem with their servers and they had to reboot them. Everything seemed fine again and today.... it's happening again!!

Any more help would be appriciated.

Thanks,

Chris.

 

[xmsre]

I have seen this where the message is going through a non-windows relay, or a firewall secure daemon, that is not fully smtp compliant. It really comes down to the way the end of message is handled. According to RFC822 it should be <crlf> . <CLRF> With some of the rich email formats like RTF or HTML and fixed line lengths, a period occasionally ends up on a seperate line, seperated from the last word of a sentence. Seeing that this unwanted behavior does occasionally occur, the Internet amended the SMTP standard to instruct compliant servers to add an additional period to the line where the first period was inadvertently "wrapped" and to continue with the transport without truncating the message.

Some older sendmail versions and firewall daemons don't comply with the amended standard, and what you get is truncated messages.

 

[xmsre]

I hate that when the brain is moving faster than my fingers. Should be Internet Standards Consortium.

If you want to reproduce the issue, create a test message in html format that contains a few dozen periods with alternating blank lines in between. Send it to the problem destination, then examine the smtp header to find out what devices it went through.

 

[xmsre]

Ah, here it is. The RFC that was amended was RFC 821, section 4.5.2 titled "Transparancy".

 

[chris505207]

Thanks for the reply XMSRE.

I will try that HTML test.

Thanks again.