MIME::Lite & MS Exchange 2000

This issue has been bugging me for a while and I finally figured out the cause.

There's a bug in Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 which causes message parts with a Content Disposition of "inline" to still be sent as attachments. So, the message body becomes an attachment.

I've successfully worked around the issue. I used to use the Path attribute for the attachment, but now I do this...

my $mailfile_data;
if ( ! open(MAILFILE, "$mailfile") ) {
    Log( "Unable to open $mailfile for email report." );
    return FAILURE;
}

{
    local $/;
    undef $/;
    $mailfile_data = <MAILFILE>;
}

close MAILFILE;

$email->attach(
    Type        => "text/html",
    Data        => $mailfile_data,
    Disposition => "inline",
);
[download]

    Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 323482
    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1806.txt
    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2183.txt

Microsoft's Knowledge Base claims that "This behavior is in compliance with the Request For Comments (RFC) 2803 and 1806.", however using their own links to the RFC standards mentioned, I found that it is not...

The presence of the filename parameter does not force an implementation to write the entity to a separate file. It is perfectly acceptable for implementations to leave the entity as part of the normal mail stream unless the user requests otherwise. As a consequence, the parameter may be used on any MIME entity, even `inline' ones. These will not normally be written to files, but the parameter could be used to provide a filename if the receiving user should choose to write the part to a file.

--
-- GhodMode

Comment on MIME::Lite & MS Exchange 2000 Select or Download Code

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Re: MIME::Lite & MS Exchange 2000 by hossman (Prior) on Jul 08, 2004 at 06:32 UTC
You don't have to slurp the whole file in, you can use the "FH" option to attachment and let it read the filehandle as it writes out the message... `my $fh; if (open($fh, "$mailfile") ) { $email->attach(Type => "text/html", Disposition => "inline", FH => $fh, ); } else { die "can't open file to attach"; }` [download] While it makes sense that MIME::Lite would automaticly put the filename info on if you use the "Path" option, I was dissapointed to discover that saying "`Filename => undef`" didn't supress that. Given the situation you describe, it seems like it might be a worthy feature request.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: MIME::Lite & MS Exchange 2000
by hossman (Prior) on Jul 08, 2004 at 06:32 UTC

You don't have to slurp the whole file in, you can use the "FH" option to attachment and let it read the filehandle as it writes out the message...

my $fh;
if (open($fh, "$mailfile") ) {
  $email->attach(Type        => "text/html",
                 Disposition => "inline",
                 FH          => $fh,
  );
} else {
  die "can't open file to attach";
}
[download]

While it makes sense that MIME::Lite would automaticly put the filename info on if you use the "Path" option, I was dissapointed to discover that saying "Filename => undef" didn't supress that. Given the situation you describe, it seems like it might be a worthy feature request.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]