262124 - Can't send/receive msword .doc attachment: null byte in message; appledouble mimetype

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 236239

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, defect)

Description

[Les Gasser]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

On a Mac under OS-X it is sometimes impossible to send, and/or
receive, and/or count on others (who are not using Macs) being able to
receive MSWord .doc files. I've checked this this morning in both
Mozilla 1.7 and Thunderbird 0.8 on Mac OS X.

Info on this problem is hard to find by querying Bugzilla, so I've
filed this report with a new summary line to make it easier to find
and reduce duplication.

A full report is made in bug 236239, comment #9, and is reproduced below.
Bug 236239 also lists other potential duplicates and related
info. 

See also:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=39285&highlight=appledouble

The following are actions and symptoms:

To reproduce: 

Compose a new message and address it
Attach a .doc file ("letter.doc" below)
Try to send the message:

 1. Some SMTP servers complain that an error has occurred, report
    "null byte in data", and won't send the msg.

 2. Some other SMTP servers do send the message. However,

 3. If the message does get sent, there is then sometimes
    a problem writing the mail to a sent folder, as has 
    been reported before. 

 4. If the message does get sent, the .doc attachment is 
    in the message but the attachment can't be read by Mozilla Mail 
    The mime header info for the attachment is:

      Content-Type: multipart/appledouble; x-mac-type="5744424E"; 
                    x-mac-creator="4D535744"; name="letter.doc"
      Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
      Content-Disposition: inline; filename="letter.doc"

That is, an appledouble encoding.

I tried a workaround reported here:

 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=39285&highlight=appledouble

namely, adding the following entry to prefs.js:

 user_pref("mail.file_attach_binary", false);

This has no effect that I can see, and the behaviors listed above
still ensue. 

This is a fairly critical bug because many people exchange .doc files with
email. 



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. See detailed description
2.
3.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 236239 ***