Intermittent Blank Emails

[Pentland G.]

I've seen something similar,

Always HTML, always sent by Outlook.  If you view the message source via
IMAP with your favourite client you should see that...

The message is in fact intact and has all of the text in it.

The plain text part of the message is fine.

The HTML is blank in some clients as there is a badly written style
sheet, that has an <if !=mso> which I understand to mean if the client
is not Microsoft.  Outlook can't display because of this HTML bug but
some other clients can.

I first came across this on the 17th Of Jan and surprise, surprise there
was a Microsoft HTML patch around then.  It is my suspicion that this
patch is the cause of it becoming visible but not the actual bug as if
it was there would be noise on the net about it.  I've been trying
different versions of HTML::Parser and trying to reproduce without
success.

There is some suspicion (among my colleagues) of the phishing code.

This is all very vague so if anyone else has some good solid testing to
help narrow this down it will be appreciated.

Answers on a postcard,

Gary


Greg Deputy wrote:
> For the last few months I've been seeing intermittent messages that
> are blank.  Various senders, but the messages are usually HTML, and
> when I ask the sender to resend, the message comes across.  I'm now
> starting to have other users report the same issue.   
> 
> When I check the logs I don't see anything out of the ordinary about
> the blank message. 
> 
> I saw a post on this in the archives back in Nov of 03, but no
> replies. 
> 
> 
> Has anyone else seen this, or have any ideas what is going on?
> 
> I just upgraded to MailScanner 4.38.10 today, have been running
> 4.35.9 previously.  Other details: Fedora Core 2, Postfix 2.1.5,
> ClamAV0.81. Scanning about 15-20k messages a day.  
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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