[rt-users] Problems with ! in html format emails

[Kevin Curtis]

Hi,
    I am sorry I just noticed that this question didn't have a proper Subject, which I have now added.


Regards

Kevin Curtis
FarSite Communications


From: rt-users [mailto:rt-users-bounces at lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Curtis
Sent: 29 May 2014 15:05
To: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com<mailto:rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com>
Subject: [rt-users] (no subject)

Hi,
    I have searched hard for the answer to this one, but haven't seen it yet, maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

We have RT version 4.2.1 installed on Ubuntu 12.04.  The main mailbox is on a Windows Exchange server, and we use fetchmail to get the mail every minute or so.  Mail sent by RT goes through sendmail.

We use RT as a Ticket handling tool for customer problems.  Our inhouse support staff use Office Outlook version 12.  The email client composes html formatted email.

The problem that I have spent the last week trying to solve is that the emails sent out have an exclamation marks "!" inserted into them at various places.

Now I have tracked down that the sendmail tool is doing this because some of the lines are longer than the maximum line length supported by SMTP (990 characters).

And I have also tracked down that the Office Outlook email client is creating the long lines when html is chosen as the message format.  (It doesn't appear to be a problem with rtf or plain text).

I know the problem isn't in RT itself, but our configuration must so typical of many RT installations that I can't believe that we are the first to see this problem, and that there isn't a solution already out there somewhere.  If someone knows what it is then I'd be pleased to hear it.

I am not an expert in any of the component parts (fetchmail, sendmail or RT), but it seemed to me the best place to try and solve the issue was in the fetchmail/mailgate interface.  So I have added a new method to EmailParser.pm.

I have used the RescueOutlook method as a template and I have tried to break lines (using the perl Text::Wrap) but this doesn't seem to be doing the job.  It looks like what I really need to do is process just the text/html section of the email and be a bit more intelligent about where the line breaks are placed.  At the moment it's just if the line is greater than 132 characters.

It's been quite a steep learning curve this week!  And it looks like it will take me a long time to get this fixed using the method I have chosen.  I hope that there is already a fix.

Thanks in Advance

Kevin Curtis
Farsite Communications.

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