Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 16:21:24 -0800 (PST) From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> To: Mark Ovens <mark@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Cc: James A Wilde <james.wilde@telia.com>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Corruption of file attachments passing late BSD relayers Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9911171620200.12797-100000@fw.wintelcom.net> In-Reply-To: <19991117210813.B316@marder-1>
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On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, Mark Ovens wrote: > On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 11:40:03AM +0100, James A Wilde wrote: > > Digest: This message reports on the corruption of file attachments > > in messages passing certain BSD UNIX mail exchangers. The > > corruption affects messages sent using Microsoft Outlook and > > Outlook Express mail clients. It may affect other clients also > > The corrupted file attachments are about 30% larger than the > > non-corrupted form. A small part of the increase appears to be the > > insertion of CRLF at 76 character intervals. I have reported this > > as a bug to FreeBSD.org but one of low priority. > > > > This is not corruption. M$ proprietry files are binary so they are > being uuencoded (which maps 3 bytes into 4 so that all bytes can > be represented in printable chars). This explains the 30% increase > in size and the CR/LF's as uuencode also splits the resultant file > into fixed length lines. All you need is to uudecode(1) them. > Netscape can do this and I'm sure that even M$ mail readers can as > well; we have a mix of Unix and M$ (Outlook) systems at work and > passing binary attachments poses no problems. > > ``man 5 uuencode'' for details of the algorithm used. > > As an aside, a customer mailed me a text file the other day, that > was ~400K, as an attachment using M$ Exchange. By the time I got it > it was >800K (this file would Zip down to <100K). Seems that Exchange > embeds the fonts for RTF into the attachment that gets renamed > winmail.dat. gee, and i thought that sendmail's ">From" frobbing was a bit intrusive... lol -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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