Corrupt pdf files, any advice.

[Plant, Dean]

Julian,

I hope you had a good holiday.

I am having a problem with pdf files corrupting when the disclaimer gets added to email passing through the MailScanner.

RH 8.0
Mailscanner 4.21-9
Spamassassin/dcc/razor2
F-prot 4.1.1

Our setup is internal MS exchange 5.5 / outlook 2000 clients with Mailscanner as a relay to the internet.

The problem only occurs when the mail is generated from MS exchange which sometimes encodes pdf files as quoted printable (looking on TechNet shows that MS exchange decides the encoding depending on the pdf file version). If the mail is generated with base64 the pdf file passes through correctly.

I have found discussions of the problem within mailing lists of similar products to Mailscanner which also seem to suffer from this problem, so I think it must be down to the MIME::QuotedPrint perl module and the ambiguity of the QP standard on different OS's.

http://mailtools.anomy.net/archives/anomy-bugs/2002-06/0003.shtml

As a quick fix I have advised users to zip all pdf files to ensure correct delivery. I have also discussed the possibility of the MS exchange people forcing the attachment encoding to base64 but they are cautious in case something else breaks. I think they are unwilling to change as it all worked before I put in the Mailscanner relay.

Is there any advice you can offer on this problem. (Suggestions of smashing up the MS exchange box can not be accepted).

Thanks in advance.

Dean Plant.

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