Email Problem

Hi,

We are using teamsite to send news letters to our clients.
We design our newsletter using templates. We submit it using a wokrflow. After the review process is done, at the end of the worklow we use an extenral task ( perl program ) to send the html page as an email (email with content type = html). We are using smtp server as our mail server.

Everything is fine except , for a particular client, in the news letter they recieve there are some random characters like '!' appearing in random places.

Do you have any idea what causes this ?

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laj1

Everything is fine except , for a particular client, in the news letter they recieve there are some random characters like '!' appearing in random places.

Do you have any idea what causes this ?

A mail transport agent along the line to that client is messing up your emails.

Since it gets to other clients intact, you shoudl do the following:
1) perform a DNS lookup for the Mail Exchange (MX) record for your client.
2) find out if you client is having trouble receiving HTML mail from anybody else.
3) find out if there's anything funky about their incoming mail server architecture. Does the mail hit one server outside the firewall, then another (or several others) behind the firewall? Can they sniff packets to see if the mail is intact when it hits their edge router? Tier mail server?

Tracking this kind of issue is a real pain. It rapidly turns into an exercise in network forensics.

Len.

Len.
3) Run traceroute to the MX for your client, and run it once for the MX of one of your clients not experiencing the problem.

Len Jaffe
My Heart Is A Flower
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Adam Stoller

This most often happens if there are extremely long lines in the content being sent. If at all possible, see if you can format your files so that there are periodic newlines embeded in the text (HTML generally ignores newlines in most cases, so it shouldn't affect the end-result).

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

laj1

I could understand extra newlines, but "random characters like !" ?

I have a similar issue with the default mails sent by Visual Annotate, it only occurs when one specific Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is involved, but that MTA is messing with any HTML email we send through it, whether generated form TeamSite, or from other applications we run.

MTAs are only supposed to read the files and either pass them along, or store them someplace. They aren't supposed to care about the contents of the files. It is the Mail User Agent (MUA) that has to read the headers and decode the MIME types.

Len.

Len Jaffe
My Heart Is A Flower
Update your DevNet profile - let us know who you are!

Adam Stoller

Be that as it may - there were problems for some people with email sent via iwsend_mail.ipl - where '!' characters were getting inserted into things like the file URLs at the end of body - and when we changed the code to insert newlines into the stream of text we were supplying as the body of the message - the problem went away.... At this point, I suggest trying it before dismissing it as not making any sense.

Note - this doesn't mean I disagree with you about it being unreasonable for this to happen - merely that we've seen this behavior in the past, and this appeared to fix it.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)