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Subject Topic: Quoted-printable bug? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Luca
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Posted: 04 March 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged Quote Luca

Sometimes quoted-printable encoding returns a mime file with too long lines (exceeding 76 chars). It happens when the last character in the line happens to be a space or a tab.

Here is the VB code:

Dim oMsg As New MailBee.Message
Dim sBody As String
sBody = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" & _
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" & _
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" & _
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" & _
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" & _
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST" & _
        vbTab & _
        vbCrLf & _
        "UVWXYZ"    
oMsg.BodyText = sBody
oMsg.SaveMessage "c:\test.eml"

If you open "C:\test.eml" with a text editor you notice one of the lines exceeds 76 characters. The same happens when you use a space instead of the tab.

With long HTML messages, this happens quite often, and, apart from being wrong, it triggers antispam filters (that's how I discovered it).
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Igor
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Posted: 05 March 2010 at 6:52am | IP Logged Quote Igor

Due to various character tables used, it is virtually impossible to maintain strict 76 chars limit when composing message with quoted-printable encoding, and most mail clients sometimes generate messages with longer lines in the source, especially when HEX-codes like 3D (corresponds to "=") are encountered. We ourselves have plenty of mails created in Outlook Express and other mailers, with longer lines.

Per our opinion, this is not a critical issue, and moreover: there is absolutely no reason to treat message as spam just because it got few longer lines. If some spamfilter exercises this kind of approach, this is a major issue of the spamfilter itself.

--
Regards,
Igor, AfterLogic Support
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Alex
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Posted: 05 March 2010 at 10:10am | IP Logged Quote Alex

Still, if this can make your life better and you have no ability to convince your antispam software vendor to fix their software so that it would not set its own voluntary considerations of what spam is, you may try this update: http://www.afterlogic.com/updates/mailbee.zip

This still does not clear the question with anti-spam filter. You should keep in mind that using a spam filter always imposes a great risk of loosing legit emails. And if your filter thinks that every email with more than 76 chars in any line is spam, you indeed may get lots of false positives. Thousands of legit emails we receive (and created by a wide range of various email clients and systems) contain longer lines.

Regards,
Alex
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Luca
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Posted: 05 March 2010 at 2:15pm | IP Logged Quote Luca

Hi Alex, thank you for the update!

You're right antispam filters sometimes use silly rules -
and this is a silly rule, in my opinion - but you can't just
change the way your recipients' ISPs configure them, if you
are sending out mails to other people. In this particular
case, the filter is SpamAssassin, which is probably the most
widely used, therefore I think the problem is relevant.

According to wikipedia, quoted-printable lines must never
exceed 76 chars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable

Still, I totally agree about antispam software - but people
use them, and as a sender you just have to deal with it
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