On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 8:02 AM, Damien K. [email protected]
wrote:
so you think, i have to set the mime-type of each attachment
manually/explicitly?
No.
First off, I’d recommend possibly contacting people in the “Ruby’s Mail
Discussion Group”
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mail-ruby
I was saying that the problem might be that there are extraneous
“Mime-Version” and “Date” headers at the start of each of the 2 parts of
the
multi-part message. These headers are needed (“Date” is required for all
emails and “Mime-Version” is required multi-part messages) at the email
message level (the first chunk of headers before the multi-part sections
in
the body). However, these headers are not needed in the header
sections of
the individual parts of the multi-part message. My theory is that some
clients may (incorrectly) be choking (and not displaying the fact that
you’ve got an attachment) because of these unnecessary headers.
This is totally a shot in the dark. Without combing through all the
email/multi-part/mime RFCs and doing extensive testing of this theory
using
hand-crafted messages in many email clients, I have no way to verify
this.
My actual recommendation to you is that you really see if you can
somehow
get a communication channel directly to a client that next reports
having
this problem. My understanding being that your problem is sporadic. I
don’t
know how your organization/company is setup and/or how many
layers/levels of
organizational/corporate barriers exist to make this difficult or
impossible. But you need to reproduce the problem else all we can do is
speculate.
Perhaps you could include a footer/sub-text on messages w/instructions
that
clients contact a specific email address or phone number if they get an
email and they can’t see their attachments? Then have at least a few
instances of the next few support requests for this specific problem
redirect to you or your development team. Then you could perhaps talk
the
client through the steps necessary to tell you exactly what type and
versions of OS and email client software their running. You could also
have
them send the broken message to you by forwarding it as an attachment.
Then you can extract the message and set up a test environment w/the
broken
email client software and verify that the forwarded email doesn’t “work”
in
said client. At this point, using a simple text editor, you could then
test theories as to why its broken by making a series of changes
(keeping
the original) one at a time to the email and opening it in the broken
client
until you isolate the exact aspect of the message causing the client to
not
display the attachment.
Only then, once you know what the real problem is, can you get advice as
to
what to do using actionmailer and the mail gem to send emails that won’t
have the attachment problem.
I sympathize with you. I basically had a very similar problem and had to
solve it for my company using this technique. However, my problem had to
do
with Thunderbird not liking the default way the hierarchy of “parts” in
our
multi-part messages (as created by the mail gem using the most obvious
message construction code) were constructed/organized. Your example,
however, was a simple “multipart/mixed” mixed message w/a text part and
an
attachment. If this is how all your messages are structured (no
“multipart/alternative” stuff) then you’ve got a different problem that
me.
Hope you find what the problem is.
–
Kendall G.