does anyone know of (filtering-)software that would fiddle with Content-Type?

[Per Jessen <pe...@computer.org>]

I've received a virtually unreadable email - about 3Mb worth, containing
text, html and a zip file.  Nothing unusual about it, except that the
Content-Type should have been "multipart/mixed" and specified a
boundary - instead it was just "text/plain", which made the mail a
little difficult for e.g. Thunderbird to digest.  Does anyone know of
software (probably a filter somewhere) that might have fiddled with
that??


/Per Jessen, Zürich

Re: does anyone know of (filtering-)software that would fiddle with Content-Type?

[Per Jessen <pe...@computer.org>]

Joseph Brennan wrote:

> 
> Per Jessen <pe...@computer.org> wrote:
> 
>> I've received a virtually unreadable email - about 3Mb worth,
>> containing
>> text, html and a zip file.  Nothing unusual about it, except that the
>> Content-Type should have been "multipart/mixed" and specified a
>> boundary - instead it was just "text/plain", which made the mail a
>> little difficult for e.g. Thunderbird to digest.  Does anyone know of
>> software (probably a filter somewhere) that might have fiddled with
>> that??
> 
> 
> Any milter MIGHT HAVE done that if configured to do so. We could do it
> with the one we use. If we were insane. Or have I overlooked a good
> reason to do this... no, I don't think so.
> 
> Why not blame the software that created the message?

The change to the Content-Type does not happen to all copies of the
email sent - which seems to indicate that something does something on
the receiving side. 


/Per Jessen, Zürich

Re: does anyone know of (filtering-)software that would fiddle with Content-Type?

[Daniel McDonald <da...@austinenergy.com>]

On 6/2/10 9:42 AM, "Joseph Brennan" <br...@columbia.edu> wrote:

> 
> Per Jessen <pe...@computer.org> wrote:
> 
>> I've received a virtually unreadable email - about 3Mb worth, containing
>> text, html and a zip file.  Nothing unusual about it, except that the
>> Content-Type should have been "multipart/mixed" and specified a
>> boundary - instead it was just "text/plain", which made the mail a
>> little difficult for e.g. Thunderbird to digest.  Does anyone know of
>> software (probably a filter somewhere) that might have fiddled with
>> that??
> 
> 
> Any milter MIGHT HAVE done that if configured to do so. We could do it
> with the one we use. If we were insane. Or have I overlooked a good
> reason to do this... no, I don't think so.

If a milter accidentally added a blank line in the headers before the
Content-Type header, many MTAs will interpret the remainder as a text/plain.


-- 
Daniel J McDonald, CCIE # 2495, CISSP # 78281

Re: does anyone know of (filtering-)software that would fiddle with Content-Type?

[Joseph Brennan <br...@columbia.edu>]

Per Jessen <pe...@computer.org> wrote:

> I've received a virtually unreadable email - about 3Mb worth, containing
> text, html and a zip file.  Nothing unusual about it, except that the
> Content-Type should have been "multipart/mixed" and specified a
> boundary - instead it was just "text/plain", which made the mail a
> little difficult for e.g. Thunderbird to digest.  Does anyone know of
> software (probably a filter somewhere) that might have fiddled with
> that??


Any milter MIGHT HAVE done that if configured to do so. We could do it
with the one we use. If we were insane. Or have I overlooked a good
reason to do this... no, I don't think so.

Why not blame the software that created the message?


Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology