[pmmail-list] Warning: PMmail 2000 can corrupt attachments when "detaching"

[Richard Beeson]

Now, I have had this happen, not only with PDFs, but also with other formats.

I was testing the Thunderbird email client, and sent myself an email with a PDF attachment. PMMail corrupted the attachment name, turning it into 
"Unamed_Attachment.ATT", and wouldn't open it in Adobe Acrobat. Since I knew it was a PDF, I renamed it, and then it opened. There was nothing wrong with 
the attachment itself, in this case; just the title. When I checked the same message in Webmail, the attachment opened fine.

The other thing that happens is that PMMail doesn't recognize files with the .JPE extension. This is another form of Jpeg file that is sent as embedded graphics 
by a lot of other users. PM View recognizes JPE files fine, and will open them. The problem is that PM Mail does not, and renames each one as an "Unnamed 
(etc) .ATT. In order to open them, it is necessary to rename each file with a JPG extension.

I'm afraid PMMail is getting a bit long of tooth, which is why I was testing Thunderbird. It has a lot of things I don't like, but those have workarounds, and I'm 
getting a little tired of struggling with the out-of-date aspects of PM Mail.





On Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:16:49 +1000, Rod Whitworth wrote:

>I am running PMmail 2000 2.20.2717.

>A client recently sent me an email using PMmail 200. It carried 4 PDFs he needed to be 
>added to his website.

>I saved each to the directory on my windows machine that is a mirror of the website and 
>edited the webpage to link them.

>On testing I found that Acrobat said that one of them was not a PDF. Clicking on the 
>attachment in PMmail resulted in the same message.

>The client checked the original document for readability and sent another copy. Same result 
>here. He sent another to himself and to me. Unreadable both places.

>Eventually I had him put a copy on his fileserver and then I sshed in and scped it to my 
>webserver where it worked perfectly.

>It turned out to be one byte longer than the "detached" file.

>To locate the problem further I bounced one of the emails to an account I can access with 
>OperaMail and the attachment was fine. This proved that the problem was neither in the file 
>nor in PMmail's encoding.

>This is an extremely rare bug that I have not knowingly had previously. Maybe some joke 
>emails that failed to decode were a manifestation but I didn't ever care about jokes.

>As this bug will never be fixed I thought it helpful to advise of its existance and to tell about 
>workarounds.

>You can do what I did and bounce the mail somewhere PMmail cannot get it and use 
>another client. There are plenty of free ones out there. Opera or Tbird for starters.

>You can arrange for incoming attachments to be zipped. Unzip will report corruption. 
>Adding some small text file to the zip may very well avoid whatever it is that triggers the 
>corruption.

>I can forward a copy of the mail if somebody is curious as it is not a confidential document 
>and is downloadable from a public website (uncorrupted form!) It is ~200kB as a file or ~
>300kB as an email.


>In the beginning was The Word
>and The Word was Content-type: text/plain
>The Word of Rod.







Richard Beeson
=================
Richardelli at earthlink.net