I couldn't decide which forum to put this into, so please forgive me if it should've been put into a different, more appropriate one.

I have inherited a cgi script that mails a question and user info to one of our librarians here where I work. The problem is that half the time the message body is in an attachment instead of an "inline" regular email.

I don't know where this setting (attached or inline) is controlled and I don't know why it isn't the same every time. The cgi program mails via the system mail program, mail, which is actually a link to the "improved" linux nail program. I looked at the man page for nail and couldn't find anything that would control this. My MTA is Sendmail and I couldn't find anything in the config to control this either. The email client the librarian is using is Novell Groupwise WebAccess (a browser/webmail interface like hotmail). I can't imagine it would be controlled with that.

I made myself a test cgi script to play around with this. To start with, I made it email exactly the same way as the other script and to the same address. For some reason, my test script will email inline every time! I even put the test script in the same directory and gave it the same ownership and permissions as the other script, but I still can't get the other script to email inline every time!

The code (emailing part) is basically as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$mailprog = "/usr/bin/mail -r $emailaddress -s Question";
$recipient = 'librarian@someschool.edu'
open (MAIL, "|$mailprog $recipient") || die "Can't open $mailprog!\n";
print MAIL "Some message text\n\n";
close (MAIL);

Any ideas?

Interesting. AFAIK the complete message (headers, body and any attachments) has to be defined before or on submitting it to the receiving MTA. Maybe the script has some (il)logic to determine *when* a message should contain an attachment (maybe post a D/L loc for the script for people to check?) and what type of attachment that would be. Your troubleshooting is OK (looking at all different aspects) but you haven't show any test results with a different MUA to see if that matters. Also I would pick three random messages that have attachments and three that don't and see if you can spot any similarities that could cause it to have attachments. BTW, what's the type of the attachment? And if all attachments are essentially plaintext you could add a procmail delivery recipe to change the disposition from say "application/x-octetstream" to "plain/text". That rule should only work for the test address with only the test subject and only if the attachment matches your filter.

Yep, you're right. I finally contacted someone from a Nail listserv who instructed me to put the following 2 things in my system mail.rc file:

1. set maximum-unencoded-line-length=950
2. set contenttype-cntrl=text/plain

Apparently nail will make the message attached if lines are too long or if they have certain special characters. The above mail.rc directives addresses these respectively.

Thanks unSpawn. Good ideas. And my troubleshooting isn't where it used to be when I was a CS major. I've developed a few bad habits.

- Gavin

I finally contacted someone from a Nail listserv
Shame you took the easy way out though ;-p


my troubleshooting isn't where it used to be when I was a CS major.
Well, like I said before, I think your posted TS was nothing to apologise for.
Thanks for posting the fix.

Heh heh. Yeah, I have so much on my plate right now that I need to get some of these things out of the way, even if it means taking the easy (quick), and less "fun", way out.

Glad to share my , when I can.