On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Sean Carolan scarolan@gmail.com wrote:
I have never encountered anything like this before, so thought I'd post here and see if anyone can help.
We have a java application that sends out notification emails to end-users. The body of the email is some boilerplate text and HTML that is pulled from a database. When the emails are received there are random instances of " !" (that's a space and a bang symbol) inserted into the email in various locations. For example a sentence that is supposed to read like this:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
ends up looking like this:
The quick b !rown fox jumped over the laz !y dog.
We combed through the source text and didn't find any unusual characters in the body of the text. Somehow these bang symbols are being inserted after the mail is handed off to sendmail. Does anyone have an idea how I can troubleshoot this further? Or maybe you've seen something similar in your environment?
thanks
Sean
I have seen this before when the email was generated by a program and being
sent through sendmail as the MTA. As I remember, there is a line length limit in an SMTP stream. And if sendmail sees a line longer than a certain number of characters it will insert a "!\n" sequence in the stream. I forget whether a receiving sendmail would remove that sequence, but I think not.
What it means is that the application is most likely not encoding the email message properly. If there is going to be a long line, the message would need to be encoded in base64 or quoted-printable. Those will allow the message to be transmitted without those extra exclamation marks.
Do a google search for "sendmail exclamation mark" and you'll find several posts about it.
DavidE