On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 06:04:42PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Friday, May 8 at 03:00 PM, quoth Aaron S.: > > I have a mystery that I'm trying to solve to no avail. > > Hopefully we can help! > > > I got a little sample XML (utf-8) encoded file that I'm trying to > > send as attachment. When I attach it, mutt correctly identifies it: > > [text/plain, 8bit, utf-8, 0.3K], since there are non-ASCII > > characters, in this case there is only 1 such character. > > Well, actually, that's an incorrect identification. It's NOT a > text/plain file, it's an xml file. According to RFC 3023, it should > either be sent as application/xml or as text/xml. > > Now, that misidentification shouldn't cause the problem you're having, > but correcting it *probably* will fix the problem. I bet that if you > add the following to your ~/.mime.types file, the problem goes away: > > application/xml jff > > > After I send it, this attached file becomes currupt. > > I tried sending your file to myself, both with and without that line > in my mime.types file, and the file didn't get corrupted either way. > > My guess is that this is ACTUALLY your mail server's fault (did you > send it through an MSFT Exchange server maybe? They're really bad > about this). Here's what I think happened: you have configured mutt to > send things in 8-bit mode (i.e. $allow_8bit). Thus, when sending a > utf-8 file attachment with an unusual character in it, mutt sent it > completely unmodified, because that's supposed to be safe to do when > sending in 8-bit mode. But some servers (and I've had this happen more > often than not with Exchange servers) attempt to convert all messages > into 7-bit form. Unfortunately, they're often very bad at it. I've had > several messages corrupted by Exchange servers simply because they > couldn't handle curly-quotes correctly. It's happened often enough > that I finally just unset allow_8bit so that mutt would always take > care of encoding my messages in a 7-bit safe manner, because mutt is > so much better at it than they are. > > Anyway, does that help? Hello, Well, it was sent from @gmail to another @gmail account. I have no idea what they run there at google. I thought about adding that to mime.types and it does work. What bothers me is that now I have to pay much closer attention as to when I'm attaching strange files. I'm gonna have to think of a way to intercept whatever mutt is sending out to make sure it's not mutt that messes up this 3byte UTF-8 character.
In any case, thanks for your pointers.
