On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Sean Carolan <scarolan at 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080918/77685c1e/attachment-0004.html>