Mail having problems decoding messages

Question

Level 6

13,697 points

Mail having problems decoding messages

We are having problems when receiving some emails. I believe this problem affects both Squirrelmail and Apple Mail.

I have been investigating a problem with Squirrelmail for quite some time and until recently had not found any clues as to why certain messages caused a problem. I now have found a clue and it seems to also apply to using Apple Mail.

Firstly I will describe what happens with Squirrelmail. We are running Squirrelmail on an XServe running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and it is the built-in version (now 1.4.5 but the problem also occurred with 1.4.4 and 1.4.3 and possibly older versions as well). Although I don't believe it is the culprit we are using Quickmail Pro Server 3.5.2.

When one of these problematic emails arrives and we try and read it (using a web-browser and Squirrelmail) we find the RFC message header is displayed in its entirety in the body section of the message window. Also if any files are attached they also are shown in raw encoded form in the body section of the window instead of being separately listed. Until recently I could not see any commonality between the messages that caused this. However I recently had several emails from the same person, all of which caused it and this provided a clue.

What I am finding is that emails using either a Charset of UTF-8 or Windows-1252 cause the problem,

e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Messages with either no Charset defined or using US-ASCII or iso-8859-1 do not cause the problem.

I have also recently had some reports of users getting a message from Apple Mail saying the following :-

"This message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted. Ask the sender to send it again using a different format or email program.

multipart/mixed"

This was with Mail in Tiger Mac OS X 10.4.2.

Now the reason I think this problem and the Squirrelmail problem are related is that the message I particularly investigated in Apple Mail which caused the above error, was also UTF-8 encoded.

I have now been able to edit a copy of the raw version of that message and by changing the Charset from UTF-8 to US-ASCII _and nothing else_ I find that it then does work correctly in both Apple Mail and Squirrelmail.

For what its worth, as far as I can see the QuickMail 3.5 (now 3.5.3) client does not have a problem with any of these messages.

Has anyone else seen the above error from Apple Mail? If so can you check the raw message header and see what Charset it is in.

Posted on Sep 5, 2005 3:58 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 6, 2005 12:02 PM in response to John Lockwood

My office is also having problems viewing messages in Mail 2.0.3.

We have some machines on Panther still which can view the same messages without any problem. (we work It is only our new Tiger machines that are having issues.

It does seem to only be messages with attachments. The message will not show any text content. It lists the filename of any attachments, but you can't download or view them.

Here is a sample of a message that was supposed to have text and images... but this is all that shows in the message:

[CODE]
--Apple-Mail-1--537591034
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Apple-Content-Length: 616
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=UTF-8;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed

--Apple-Mail-1--537591034
Content-Type: multipart/related;
type="text/html";
boundary=Apple-Mail-2--537591034

--Apple-Mail-2--537591034
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Apple-Content-Length: 3168
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1

--Apple-Mail-2--537591034
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename=DSC06737.JPG
X-Apple-Content-Length: 2545018
Content-Type: image/jpeg;
name=DSC06737.JPG;
x-unix-mode=0666
Content-Id: <4FA2DB85-FE33-4A71-BAEE-71BD0B6C9102@local>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
[/CODE]

This appears to be a major bug that needs to be fixed by Apple. I hope they fix it QUICK.

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Answer 2

Sep 6, 2005 2:17 PM in response to John Lockwood

I am also having problems. I recently installed Tiger. Today I received an email that had scattered artwork. I then called this particular email up on my ISP's mail website. There was a lot of text, with the artwork showing one individual piece under each statement in the email.

My squirrel mail showed no text at all, and the artwork was scattered all over the screen.

Glad I have the ISP website to call up my mail in situations like this, but the problem definitely needs to be fixed.

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Answer 3

Sep 12, 2005 4:54 PM in response to John Lockwood

I'm having the same error: This message cannot be displayed because... even with ASCII messages. I know the the sender is using entourage on a Mac, I'm using mail on Tiger.

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Answer 4

John Lockwood Author

Level 6

13,697 points

Sep 29, 2005 3:15 AM in response to Bill Heaton

I'm having the same error: This message cannot be displayed because... even with ASCII messages. I know the the sender is using entourage on a Mac, I'm using mail on Tiger.

Saying the message is ASCII (i.e. plain text) does not necessarily mean the same thing as saying it is using Charset=US-ASCII

The problematic ones I receive which are using Charset=UTF-8 are still typically plain text (i.e. not necessarily HTML or RTF).

You need to look at the raw message to confirm this, of course because Apple Mail cannot read it you have a problem doing so! Firstly can you confirm whether you are using IMAP or POP in Apple Mail? Currently for our users they are only seeing this via IMAP. Secondly is it possible for you to locate the original message on the server and examine it there to confirm whether it is using :-

Charset=UTF-8 [Causes problem] or Charset=US-ASCII [Does not cause problem]

Finally what mail server are you using? I am beginning to think QuickMail Server may be the cause, other than that it would be a Mac OS X operating system problem.

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Answer 5

Oct 13, 2005 7:39 AM in response to John Lockwood

Very much appreciate this thread as you all have identified symptoms of the problem I am experiencing and troubleshooting this is out of my league. I work for a community college that is using Oracle Collaboration Suite as its email/files/etc. platform. I use Mail on my Mac and connect using IMAP. I've had some syncing problems with deleting files under Panther but other than that, no issues. The decoding problems happened after my recent upgrade to Tiger. Here are two emails that came in recently from Apple that could not be decoded properly. Neither of them refer to the UTF-8 Charset however.

From Apple eNews
=============================================
-- ----------=11291636737301915
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

The new iPod. Music, photos, and now video.

-------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------

15,000 songs. 25,000 photos. 150 hours of video. The new iPod.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/initial.woa/wa/initial?lpid=212 155
===============================================

From Apple eNews for Educators on October 6:
===============================================
--This is_the_boundary_hipho
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

You appear to be using an email application that won't properly
display the graphical (or HTML) version of our newsletter. Because
we want you to enjoy reading Apple eNews for Education- K12, we recommend that you
visit the following site and switch to the plain text version of
this newsletter:

http://www.apple.com/enews/change/

If you have trouble reading today's issue of Apple eNews for Education- K12, please
consider visiting the following web page where it has been posted
for your enjoyment:

http://www.apple.com/enews/currentk12issue/

If you receive a blank message with an enclosure, drag the enclosure
into the window of your web browser and today's issue of Apple eNews for Education- K12
will display in your web browser.

Thank you.

--This is_the_boundary_hipho
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<html>
<head>
<title>Apple eNews for Education: October 2005</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.apple.com/main/css/fonts.css" title="fonts">
</head>
<body topmargin="0" marginheight="0">


<center>
===========================================
and it goes on from there

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Answer 6

Yozza

Level 1

25 points

Dec 19, 2005 6:37 PM in response to David Mattson1

I am having the same issue, except that I am connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server. Usually the first time I view the email it appears fine, but then if I view the email again later, I see the message in the format you have described, and I have to ask the original sender to resend the message (which is quite embarrasing!)

Sometimes I can also quit Mail and when I restart the message appears properly for a while. However if I move the message to another folder, it is stuck in this format forever.

I have been using Mail since Mac OS X 10.1, and connecting to an exchange server since 10.2 and never had this problem till recently. Everyone else at work uses Microsoft Entourage, however I preferred Mail because it worked so well with .Mac and my iPod.

I have tried clearing out the account, and getting Mail to redownload my mail from the server, but it still happens. I've also tried changing the account type from IMAP to Exchange, but its still happening, and the responsiveness of Mail seemed better when the account type was IMAP.

Does anyone know what is happening?

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Answer 7

klausb

Level 1

0 points

Jan 25, 2006 1:11 AM in response to John Lockwood

Same problem as described several times here in this thread: here is an example of that I see very often when I get email from my company IMAP4 server:
I do hope that this gets fixed ASAP as it forces me to use Thunderbird,
which displays everything correctly.

--Boundary (IDnAVuZSdvslPimvu6vGZbnw)
Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT

Hello everybody,
<...>
--Boundary (IDnAVuZSdvslPimvu6vGZbnw)
Content-type: application/octet-stream;
name="05-04-27 mel paper07.doc"
Content-transfer-encoding: BASE64
Content-disposition: attachment; filename="05-04-27 mel paper07.doc"

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAvAAAA
.....

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Answer 8

Jan 28, 2006 8:08 AM in response to John Lockwood

I too have this problem. I would be glad to provide Apple with any pertinent information to get this fixed, or to help me with a work around.

Personally, I'm shocked that AOL can properly assemble these e-mails, and Apple can't.

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