GNU Mailman

Exchange Address Setup for External List - Attachment get lost

Asked by Brian McCarthy

The attachment does not get lost, its attachment status gets lost.

I have a list setup at domain.tdl - I want users on exchange.tdl to send to it. The admin of exchange.tdl determined that he wanted to setup an Exchange Group List for his users. Please don't ask

So, sue on exchange.tdl starts a message to the list and uses the Exchange Group address. That, in turn, sends the message to domain.dtl where the list exists.

Messages gets processed and sent out to the list - however, the attachment has been munged so it shows up when I view the message source, but mail clients do not see it.

Any idea what might cause this at the mailman side? I am willing to go back and tell them that they are sending the message wrong, but I need more data.

Oh ya, sending directly to <email address hidden> with an attachment works fine - so I don't know what that extra level of indirection is doing.

Headers like:

X-MS-Has-Attach: yes

What else can I look at? The exim_mainlog?

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Brian McCarthy
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Revision history for this message
Brian McCarthy (bmccarthy) said : 		#1

In both cases, I am seeing:

X-ACL-Warn: {

Revision history for this message
Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said : 		#2

What Mailman version is this?

Is Content filtering -> filter_content Yes or No? If Yes, what are the rest of the content filtering settings.

Does the list have non-empty Non-digest options -> msg_header and/or msg_footer?

What is the problem with the message from the list? If you don't know enough about MIME to diagnose the problem, can you post the Content-Type: header from the main message headers and all of the boundaries and part headers from the message. You don't need to include the actual part bodies.

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Brian McCarthy (bmccarthy) said : 		#3

Version.py:VERSION = '2.1.13'

Content Filtering is off

Message is attached from an Exchange Account - New Message -> Attach File (in this case a pdf)

It has multiple parts - text, a winmail.dat then the pdf - so, in order:

--_000_50ED655971A113459388C32666825D0C4C69A271CD - snip -
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- some text here.... -

--_000_50ED655971A113459388C32666825D0C4C69A271CD - snip -
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat"

then what looks like the pdf file (not the winmail.dat file)

Then

--_000_50ED655971A113459388C32666825D0C4C69A271CD - snip - 101
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

 --- mailman list footer ---
--_000_50ED655971A113459388C32666825D0C4C69A271CD - snip - 101

What I don't see is:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="-some-funky-number"
MIME-Version: 1.0

Before all of that!

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Brian McCarthy (bmccarthy) said : 		#4

the boundary piece is not there, even when a message is sent through that server without the 'global alias'

Revision history for this message
Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said : 		#5

Does your last statement mean you do not see a Content-Type: and MIME-Version: header in the main message headers along with To:, From:, Subject:, etc.? If that is the case, any user agent should render the entire thing as a text/plain message body.

In any case, it looks like Outlook/Exchange is attaching the PDF in Microsoft's Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (tnef) instead of as a base64 encoded application/pdf part. See the page at <http://www.tippingmar.com/tnef/> for some information.

I suspect that these same messages would have the same problem if sent directly to a non-Exchange/Outlook recipient without Mailman at all.

Essentially all Mailman does in this case is add the last part containing the footer immediately before the terminating boundary. I don't think it is munging the attachment part in any way.

Revision history for this message
Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said : 		#6

Our posts crossed. By "last statement", I meant

What I don't see is:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="-some-funky-number"
MIME-Version: 1.0

Before all of that!

Revision history for this message
Brian McCarthy (bmccarthy) said : 		#7

Mark,

Thanks for all your responses to the mailing list, and here.

>suspect that these same messages would have the same problem if sent directly to a non-Exchange/Outlook
>recipient without Mailman at all.

That is what I would think also, but Thunderbird reads the messages correctly.

I do agree that the issue is in how Exchange is putting things together. - Thanks for that link!