1

Bit of a strange one,

recently we have been told that a few emails sent from our servers occasionally are including the mail headers within the body content, example below, however I have done various test scripts and sent test emails from the servers in question only not to experience this. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Our setup is Windows 2003 R2 servers running IIS 6 ASP.Net 3.5 SP1 however we use the old CDONTS.Newmail mailer

X-Priority: 3 

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal 

Importance: Normal 

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.3790.4325
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  • Did you ever figure anything out here? I'm curious about the outcome...
    – jj33
    Jul 13, 2009 at 13:03
  • I decided that supporting CDONTS was wasting time, especially as ever new server had to be setup to use it. So I upgraded the various ASP code to use CDO.Message and it appears the issue has gone away Magic ;)
    – mjjames
    Aug 3, 2009 at 11:37

2 Answers 2

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An improperly quoted header that includes two embedded newlines, or CR/NL, could cause this. The only difference between the header and the body in the spec is two connsecutive newline characters (in other words, there can't be any blank lines in the header).

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  • Isn't CR/LF the Internet standard? Jul 10, 2009 at 14:55
  • \r\n is, yeah. The problem is that on most systems I personally work on, that's not the native line ending. (\r for mac os, \n for unix). However, the software usually handles this for you, which is why I was so ambiguous about it. That said, that can sometimes be the source of a problem like this - the sending software doesn't see a bare linefeed as an "end of line" indicator, but something in the middle does, resulting in sent email that's "fine" and received email that's "broken".
    – jj33
    Jul 10, 2009 at 16:47
0

Can you archive the SMTP traffic anywhere? You might be able to temporarily route mail through an SMTP server with an archive facility e.g. a quickly knocked together Linux machine. The point of this is that you'll be able to examine what was actually sent out from your server and if the mail format is getting muddled you'll be able to see exactly what is happening.

We use a mail filter (Mail Marshal, which is excellent, though I've also used MIMESweeper and that's just as good) and use this to keep all mails for a bit. Mail Marshal has a 30 day eval period, which would be long enough for your puposes.

JR

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