Norvell Spearman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It seems when a user sends mail with an attachment and it bounces back, the
> bounce-back has the attachment in-line with the mail text (as opposed to
> something you can click on then save or open). This isn't a major problem
> (my users aren't getting bounce-backs with 20MB attachments every five
> minutes) but when it does occur users complain about their mail reading
> program taking much longer to open---or even locking up---because of the
> in-line attachment. Is there any way to change this behavior or is this how
> all e-mail servers are supposed to work (this is the first full-blown mail
> server I've set up)?
There's no "right" or "wrong" way for an MTA to do this -- provided the MTA
returns full headers with the bounce, it's done it's job. It doesn't even
have to return the body of the message at all. Also, if MUAs are crashing
when they receive these messages, they should be upgraded/fixed or discarded.
However, returning attachments as attachments would be very problematic --
qmail would then have to parse the original message, determine if it was a
MIME-encoded message, what type (multipart, etc.), decode each of the parts,
and then generate a multipart bounce message, re-attaching and re-encoding the
attachments from the first message. With that much parsing and text
manipulation going on, qmail would have been _much_ more difficult to get
BugFree (tm).
Charles
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Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
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