Outllook Encoding problem

[comaboy]

OK, situation: One of our users has OL2000, the rest are OL97. When the OL2000 sends email, the OL97 clients find the email as a text attachment within the email, like ATT0001.TXT. Another OL2000 client parses the email correctly.

We all use MIME as a sending format, and after a few wasted hours of changing configuration options, I finally got a few people to email me, Telnetted the mailserver and had a look at the headers.

I identified the problem as the Content-Transfer-Encoding: field. It was set to quoted-printable on the OL2000 and 7-bit on the (correctly decoded) OL97 mails.

After a little playing, we finally set the sending format to UUEncode instead of MIME. Now the messages are send without the Content-Transfer-Encoding: field at all, and are being decoded correctly by the OL97 clients.

Can anyone shed some light on what earth OL2000 is doing here? - I've solved the problem, but I don't know exactly how or why, and I hate that!

Thanks

 

[Hasit]

Not sure why this has happened. By default OL2000 uses MIME as its encoding setting as does OL97.

I have only seen this on 2 occasions:

1. The mail server's setting is incorrect, so OL2K native is looking for MIME, but the server has screwed around with the mail and sent it as something else, hence the attachment. (the attachment incidentally is sent because OL2K cannot decode the content as it is not recognised (for some reason) and so it sticks it in as an attachment in the hope that ignoring it will be OK!)

2. Emails through either internet or X.400. Again thi has to do with encoding and decoding.

UUENCODE is a wider and more accepting format, which is why I suspect it works.

Hope that sheds *some* light. You may want to raise the issue with Microsoft themselves.....

 

[comaboy]

I think you're on the right track. Our ISP uses Unix servers, so I think the problem originates as it transfers through.

I _think_ that OL97 only understands certain Content-Transfer-Encoding types. If it finds an unknown type, it throws a minor wobbly.

Thanks for the reply, I be happy to hear any more comments.

 

[Hasit]

Ah. I know Unix better than the MS Mail Server, and Unix defaults to UUencode. I don't see why it should error in this way, but MIME vs. UUenCode is where its (as you say) throwing a wobbly.

 

[comaboy]

Well that seems to be it, then, Hasit. Thanks for the advice.