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Community ▶ Questions ▶ UTF-8/Base64/intl. chars = trouble
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UTF-8/Base64/intl. chars = trouble

email

Folks, I am having a bad trouble. I run a large RedHat 8.0 distribution with the default stuff (nothing extra, no updates). It looks like when messages with international characters (russian, in my case) arrive to my mailboxes, they get corrupted somehow. The trick is that the messages are in UTF-8 and wrapped in Base64 (generated by GMail). The messages I see have a header entry:

> X-MIME-Autoconverted: from base64 to 8bit by li***.members.linode.com id ***

(I marked sensitive stuff with stars). So, these messages have completely lost the newlines! All the lines are concatenated. All the other recipients of the message (not on the server) receive everything fine. If the message is sent without international characters, it is also fine.

So, do we have some kind of a known problem in Base64/UTF-8 handling by the mail components, or what?

Any help is greatly appreciated, because this actually affects a number of mailing lists that I host… :cry:

3 Replies

Are you sure this isn't poor handling by your e-mail clients?

Compare the raw message source in your gmail outbox (if gmail lets you view the raw message) to the raw message in your inbox. If they're not the same then its time to look at your MTA.

I'm not familiar with RH8 - what MTA does it use?

@Orca:

So, do we have some kind of a known problem in Base64/UTF-8 handling by the mail components, or what?
What are the mail components?

kenny

It seems I have found the culprit. It was the sendmail 8.12.8, the default one with RH 8.0. It seems that in version 8.12.3 they have changed the base64-decoding mechanism by replacing it with some buggy one. As a result, some corruption happens. They rolled back the change in 8.12.11.

So, this is it, in a nutshell. I have replaced the binary with the 8.12.11, and the problem went away.

Hope this is useful to somebody.

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