On Fri, 4 Sep 2020 at 16:00, Gregory P. Ennis PoMec@pomec.net wrote:
Everyone,
I have just upgraded a Centos 5 server to a Centos 7 server and am having difficulty with a change of behavior of mailx with the use of a command line of :
mail -s 'This is the subject' user@domain.com < text_file.txt
On Centos 5 when mailx was used by a program started by a cron job we were able to send a text file as an email message and the headers did not contain 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64'
The version of mailx in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is based off the old BSD mailx program (in Debian it looks like it is still available as bsd-mailx). That version was 'bit' rotting and having problems with newer mail servers. For an afternoon read http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx_history.html and https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-June/msg00628.html [It looks like this was further forked into s-nail which Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc seem to ship as the default for mailx now.]
Looking for why this change was done I found these:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-June/msg00632.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-June/msg00641.html
which says one of two ways to hack around this problem: 1. Put in /etc/mail.rc the items needed 2. Try the MAILRC=/dev/null hack
and finally a google "heirloom mailx Content-Transfer-Encoding base64" got me to
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10343106/linux-mail-file-log-has-content...
which seems to offer changing it to
cat -v {{file}} | mail -s "your subject" "your@recipient.internet"
On Centos 7 the headers contain 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64' and when the client gets the e-mail they are unable to open it up.
The interesting thing is that on Centos 7 when the command line is used by typing the above command 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit' is placed in the header and the client can see the e-mail without a problem.
I have looked for a way to control the 'Content-Transfer-Encoding:' header to '7bit' when we use a cron job, but I have not been able to figure out how.
Your suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you,
Greg Ennis
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos