Screaming.Pict
Level 1 (1 points)

Q: Mail.app- 'Remove Attachments' corrupting mails

I have a weird issue that I've not seen mentioned anywhere. Wondering if anyone can give me any debugging tips.

 

I'm using Mail 5.0 in Lion 10.6.1 (issue was occurring in 10.6.0 as well).

 

I have Mail connected to Exchange Server 2010.

 

I have a fairly tight restriction on mailbox sizes so I have to remove attachments from emails before I file them.

 

My problem is this; about 1 in 3 times I remove an attachment the 'replacement' e-mail is full of gibberish characters.

 

Typically if I look at the raw source of the e-mail then the text version of the mail is retained correctly- it seems to be the Base64 encoded version that is corrupted.

 

Any idea what I can do to debug this? I have tried removing the envelope files and removing/adding the account back in and re-syncing it but the issue has reappeared.

 

I've reported this to Apple on http://bugreports.apple.com but have not had a response.

 

Thanks in advance.

Unibody MacBook Pro 15" 2.8GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Aug 22, 2011 7:48 AM

by Rich In Space,Solvedanswer
Rich In Space Rich In Space
Level 1 (30 points)
A:

New insight:  I see now what Apple does wrong in its "Remove Attachments" command.

 

When they find a base64-encoded text/html portion in the original message they – for some reason – decide to decode it first. Then, after removing the attachment from the source, they write the decoded text version into the new message but leave the encoding headers intact, ie "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64".

 

I verified this by comparing original messages with those created after attachment removals that went berzerk. I haven't been able to verify if this is true for all base64 text/html messages with attachments however. Has any found any deviations from this?

 

Suggested solution (to Apple): Stop decoding any base64 parts of the original message. Just leave them as they are, and write them back into the new message with their original headers.

Posted on Feb 9, 2015 7:21 AM

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Screaming.Pict

Q: Mail.app- 'Remove Attachments' corrupting mails

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  • by Screaming.Pict,

    Screaming.Pict Screaming.Pict Aug 10, 2012 4:13 AM in response to josephavellino
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Aug 10, 2012 4:13 AM in response to josephavellino

    Joseph,

     

    That sounds like a slighty different issue that would warrant its own thread. I've not seen that issue before.

  • by Screaming.Pict,

    Screaming.Pict Screaming.Pict Aug 10, 2012 4:19 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Aug 10, 2012 4:19 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Hmm... an update to my previous message and a little more information on this issue.

     

    1- If you copy (or move) a message to a local folder before removing the attachment then it will not corrupt the message in the same way.

    2- However there is often slight corruption with e.g. a long-hyphen " – " being replaced with " – "

    3- And when you copy the message back to the Exchange server, it then gets corrupted!

     

    This leads me to think there's a 2-part problem, one part is the slight corruption that must be something to do with code pages etc. and then that is what's triggering the complete corruption when saving to an Exchange server.

  • by rickjtaylor,

    rickjtaylor rickjtaylor Aug 17, 2012 9:01 PM in response to josephavellino
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 17, 2012 9:01 PM in response to josephavellino

    Joseph, I am having this exact issue. Did you in fact start another thread or have you learned anything new?

  • by josephavellino,

    josephavellino josephavellino Aug 22, 2012 6:47 AM in response to rickjtaylor
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Aug 22, 2012 6:47 AM in response to rickjtaylor

    Rick, I didn't start another thread as I am not sure where I would do so.

  • by josephavellino,

    josephavellino josephavellino Aug 22, 2012 6:49 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Aug 22, 2012 6:49 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Thanks for the note.

     

    I'm using the Mac Mail app on my Mountain Lion Macbook Air.

     

    It seems that message after message, when I take out attachments, Mail says that the attachments have been removed, but a lot of pieces of the email become .txt files at the end of the message.

     

    Very frustrating.

     

    Please let me know where it might be better off creating a new thread on this.

     

    Thanks in advance.

  • by gindaray,

    gindaray gindaray Aug 30, 2012 3:15 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 30, 2012 3:15 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    -Screaming.Pict

     

    The account that is corrupted is a pop account. I downloaded the mail, read the mail. when i removed attachment... all chinese fonts becomes corrupted. Totally unreadable. I changed to thunderbird. Am now thinking of going back to mail due to the ability to quicklook attachment. But I am not planning to remove attachment at all from mail.

  • by Screaming.Pict,

    Screaming.Pict Screaming.Pict Aug 30, 2012 5:33 AM in response to gindaray
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Aug 30, 2012 5:33 AM in response to gindaray

    gindaray,

     

    That's interesting- I've not seen this reported with a local (i.e. POP) account before. However I have seen similar behaviour when copying mails to a local folder and removing attachments where the mail looks OK but if you reload the folder or move the mail it proves to be corrupt.

     

    I'll try to update Apple on that point in the bug I raised.

  • by roy16,

    roy16 roy16 Sep 10, 2012 5:31 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 10, 2012 5:31 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Hi,

     

    I can report that I also get corrupted messages after removing attachments with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and Apple Mail (4.5 1084).  The mail server type is Exchange 2007.

     

    The problem seems to arise in messages with additional German characters (umlauts,etc.), but it doesn't happen in every instance.

     

    Thanks,   Roy

  • by Bwsmile,

    Bwsmile Bwsmile Nov 14, 2012 7:46 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 14, 2012 7:46 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Ugh. I've got the same issue as the original one, on 10.8.2, using Mail 6.2. I stopped using mail.app in favor of Outlook over a year ago because of this issue, but I just upgraded to Mountain Lion, figuring they must have fixed this by now. For the most part, I prefer mail over Outlook, but this is a deal-killer for me. I get 10 or 20 attachments/day that I need to remove to keep under my quota.

     

    Not sure what to do, other than complain to Apple via bug reporter.

     

    As far as narrowing down where this bug is, I don't think it has anything to do with Asian fonts. When I remove attachments, the email appears fine immediately (It replaces the attachment icon with a "this attachment has been manually removed" message). But if I look at a different folder and then go back to the message, it's gibberish. Also, the message appears corrupted on my iPhone as well, so it looks like mail did corrupt the message itself, not just the view (though it's different gibberish on the phone than on my Mac).

  • by Screaming.Pict,

    Screaming.Pict Screaming.Pict Mar 15, 2013 4:45 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Mar 15, 2013 4:45 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Issue tentatively appears resolved in 10.8.3.

     

    I've trawled through 6-7 old mails with Chinese characters in them (that used to provoke the issue a lot) with attachments, copied them and removed the attachments and no corruption.

  • by Edward Tewkesbury,

    Edward Tewkesbury Edward Tewkesbury Mar 15, 2013 8:43 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Mar 15, 2013 8:43 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    Great follow-up. Thanks for the tentative good news. Please keep us posted.

  • by Screaming.Pict,

    Screaming.Pict Screaming.Pict Mar 19, 2013 4:34 AM in response to Edward Tewkesbury
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Mar 19, 2013 4:34 AM in response to Edward Tewkesbury

    Hmmm- subsequent to this I I think that the issue is still there, however mail.app is no longer rendering the garbage text, just skipping it.

     

    I have had a couple of mails that, on removing the attachments, were suddenly missing most of the history/text. Checking the raw source shows the same symptoms as before; all of the text is there with the whitespace removed.

  • by catalan,

    catalan catalan Sep 20, 2013 10:13 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 20, 2013 10:13 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    I have experienced this "garbage after removing attachment" issue since some time. I am now with OS X 10.8.4 and Mail 6.5, and still happens. Rebuilding mailboxes does not help. It started to happen with messages coming from a few specific Windows users, and totally unpredictable... but today it happened to me with one of the messages I had just sent out! Always normal latin fonts, perhaps with accents, but some without... 

     

    I leave aside the awkward fact that the menu item "Remove attachments" is not always available. Sometimes, with the same message in different machines but with the same OS (my account is an IMAP one, and I consult it from different machines, but always with Mail and keeping local copies), one machine does not allow you to remove attachments, and the other one does. It started to happen with Lion, and some time ago, one of the machines still had Snow Leopard, and this one always allowed removing attachments.

     

    Any help would be appreciated. For outgoing messages, removing attachments is a must; otherwise, you will have two copies of the same file in your disk (i.e., if you sent out one file of yours, which you want to keep filed in its proper place).

     

    Best,

  • by Edward Tewkesbury,

    Edward Tewkesbury Edward Tewkesbury Nov 8, 2014 8:44 PM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Nov 8, 2014 8:44 PM in response to Screaming.Pict

    This problem (removing attachments corrupting the text of the message) seems to have returned with a vengeance under Yosemite (Mail 8.0). I'm surprised more folks don't have this problem, especially as Apple has shrunk the default storage space for iCloud accounts, and as many sources counsel removing attachments from iCloud emails as a sure-fire way to manage storage space.

     

    Has anyone been able to solve this problem with a different OS X mail client?

  • by 750 H2C,

    750 H2C 750 H2C Dec 16, 2014 4:51 AM in response to Screaming.Pict
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 16, 2014 4:51 AM in response to Screaming.Pict

    I have both these problems: the one described by Sreaming.Pict about gibberish after removing attachments and the one josephavellino mentions with the .txt files. I could live with the second problem, since these .txt files do not take up any space, but the first problem seems to be accelerating.

     

    Over the years, I've seen this phenomenon once in a while, but now (under Yosemite and Mail 8) it appears every third time I try to remove an attachment or so.

     

    I'm not using any Asian character coding, and I'm not on an Exchange server or anything like it.

     

    From now on, I'll move messages to local mailboxes before trying to remove any attachments. Let's hope it works. My workaround up to now has been to make sure I reply to the original message (the one with the attachment) before removing attachments. Then I'll have the original text in my reply, at least.

     

    Baah, I think the Mac is getting more and more littered with this kind of nagging bugs.

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