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

[Rod Whitworth]

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.