766869 - Roadrunner webmail: Composer email body displays binary attachments as plain text instead of contents of document

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[dHyman]

Attachment: bugzilla 120621—0236.doc

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Build ID: 20120614114901

Steps to reproduce:

log onto roadrunner's webmail [and I did this for 2 different roadrunner email accounts
---as a crosscheck]
choose the TO email or c&p it
type or c&p into subject field
type or c&p body letter
attach resume [rr uploads it]
click 'send' [spellChecker is set to start before sending]
spellcheck
click 'ok'
wait for the "test" emails to arrive
open them
[reminder: tested this out for 2 different roadrunner email accounts]




Actual results:

with both email accounts, WITHIN the body of the email sent AND the email received, a whole bunch of :
             ',��g�� �hO�odS !b!0�
with my document sandwiched in between 
                  [and Scribus], Photoshop [and GIMP], Dr
appears AFTER the letter


Expected results:

there should not be a "decomposed" open document indicator nor my document all written at the end of the email body, i. e., after the original letter

If you can give me instructions, I can fix it. I'd rather not use internet explorer or google

thought you might like to see my email

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

Hi,
please avoid attaching doc files that just contain text and a picture. Instead just attach the picture/image file itself and add the text as a comment in this report, so that your text can be searched for (currently it cannot as it is "hidden" in the doc file for the search function in this bug tracker).

So what seems to happen according to your screenshot (thanks, it was helpful) is that you attach a DOC document, but RoadRunner does not know that DOC should mean "Microsoft Word" here and does not know how to interpret it correctly. Word documents contain "binary data" (that is what you meant when writing "coding" in the summary). To simplify it, binary data is anything that is not text. It is used for example to mark a certain amount of text as "bold" or "in large size and in yellow", compared to normal plain text. 
As RoadRunner does not know what to do with your attachment, it displays the file as Plain Text.

I don't think that there is a bug in the Firefox code here that could fix the RoadRunner website, it looks more like RoadRunner themselves should provide an option to specify the filetype that you upload.
So next time you contact their support you could tell them that you tried to attach a Word document (which is binary data) but it gets displayed as Plain Text in the browser, hence there is some binary garbage displayed.

Hope that helps. :)

Comment 2

[dHyman]

Oh! Thank you so so very much! I will no go talk w roadrunner and make sure I go farther up in the tech chain. I've past experience with first and second contacts not knowing how to do something, but, being able to use a more correct terminology is SO WONDERFUL!

Thanks!

dHyman

Comment 3

[dHyman]

On reviewing /gathering items and thoughts in order to speak w roadrunner later, I found that yesterday, a rr tech told me to try rr on internet explorer. I did and the email came though normally.

I. e., 'Open Attachment: BHA-Employment-App —fill-in.pdf' is displayed [is what should occur].

Therefore, one can conclude the issue IS with Mozilla.

So, if there is something else I can go back to roadrunner with, kindly forward it.

Thank you!

dHyman

Comment 4

[Andre Klapper]

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #1)
> So what seems to happen according to your screenshot (thanks, it was
> helpful) is that you attach a DOC document, but RoadRunner does not know
> that DOC should mean "Microsoft Word" here and does not know how to
> interpret it correctly.

To make it even more techy, the filetype is determined by its "MIME type" or "Content Type" (both names describe the same).
For example, when you uploaded the Word document in your initial comment, you did not set a correct MIME type so it had exactly the same issue as what you face with RoadRunner. That's why I had to change it manually so Firefox opens it in MS Word instead of showing the text itself in the broken way (misintrepreted) that you experience.
See the line between comment 0 and comment 1 in this report:
Attachment #635200 [details] - Attachment mime type: text/plain → application/msword

You can read more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME_Type

I simply don't know RoadRunner WebMail so I don't know if they offer any way to set the MIME Type. I still consider it highly unlikely that this is a FireFox issue, as normally the *website* offers the user to set the MIME type when uploading data.
For example, here in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=766869 , when you click up there on "Add an attachment", you are asked to define its "Content Type".

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It can be a Gecko issue if the server uses the content-type that Gecko sends while uploading a file.

It's not clear to me what kind binary file here is involved in the upload.
Bad things can happen if the user got a wrong mimetype for a given file extension in his mimetype.rdf

>attach resume [rr uploads it]
Which file format do you use for this resume ?