On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 02:41:33AM -0400, Keith Wright wrote:

...

From: Bill Mills-Curran <bill@mills-curran.net>

I'm having troubles retaining special (8 bit?) encoding in email messages from the MS Exchange server where I work. Here's the normal path of my data:

MS Exchange -> MS(?) IMAP -> fetchmail -> linux sendmail -> procmail -> mutt

By the time an email with color fonts gets to mutt, the color is gone. As a test, I modified my .fetchmailrc to specify "cat" as my MDA so eliminated sendmail, procmail and mutt as offenders.

I've also added "pass8bits" to my .fetchmailrc -- no improvement.

Thus, I've narrowed the suspects to MS IMAP and fetchmail.

Does anyone have experience with this problem?

Well, I use Emacs to read mail. All my mail is green on black, with some yellow headers. I like it that way and there is nothing MS Exchange or anybody else can do about it.

I'm sure that the mail reader (mutt in my case) has nothing to do with it, because I looked at the "raw" output file that fetchmail delivered, and the color (8 bit) codes were gone.

You don't say how you made colored fonts in the first place. If you are using HTML to specify fonts then I don't see how the loss of them can have anything to do with 8-bit encoding, because HTML is just Ascii with extra structure.

I made the codes using rich text in MS Outlook. (I only did that for a test.) The colors I'm interested in seeing are used by other employees to flag specific text in their email, and I'm at a disadvantage because I can't see their highlighting.

Could you be sending MIME Content-Type: multipart/alternative, with Mutt set to read the Ascii alternative?

I don't suspect that it's a mime issue, but I could be wrong. (It's been known to happen. :-) )

If you are trying to send DOS screen colors in the high order bytes---I don't know what to say---you aren't doing that right?

I don't claim that MS is doing anything right, but I'm stuck with trying to comply with their data.

I didn't understand what you meant by using 'cat' as a MDA. Unix 'cat' copies a file. Do you mean you copied a file from your local disk into fetchmail thus bypassing IMAP but using Mutt, or do you mean you copied incoming mail directly to the screen, thus bypassing Mutt but using IMAP? Or am I out in the weeds?

Here's the MDA story. By default, fetchmail delivers (outputs) messages to your local sendmail process. You can have fetchmail do something different if you like. (For a while, I just had it deliver to a file. [Yes, I managed locking.]) For this test, I wanted to eliminate sendmail as the cause of the problem, so I told fetchmail to use "cat" as the mail delivery agent (MDA). This would output the message directly to my interactive process, which I redirect to a file. I could look at that file several ways to confirm that the color codes had been stripped. So, I think that the MS IMAP and fetchmail are the only remaining suspects.

-- Keith

_______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Thanks, Bill

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 09:53:16AM -0400, Charles R. Anderson wrote:

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 09:45:05AM -0400, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:

...

I'm sure that the mail reader (mutt in my case) has nothing to do with it, because I looked at the "raw" output file that fetchmail delivered, and the color (8 bit) codes were gone.

What 8-bit color code are they using? ANSI escape sequences?

...

I made the codes using rich text in MS Outlook. (I only did that for

Rich Text is just plain 7-bit ASCII with markup, ala HTML, isn't it? I don't see how an 8-bit issue could prevent transmission of RTF. _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Charles, Right you are... It's not an 8-bit issue. Maybe it's even a mime issue. I sent myself a color message and saved it to a file in Outlook. Here's the file: **************************************************************** {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}{\f1\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;\red51\green153\blue102;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\fi-1800\li1800\tx1800\cf1\b\f0\fs20 From:\tab\b0 Mills-Curran, Bill\par \b Sent:\tab\b0 Thursday, July 22, 2004 10:04 AM\par \b To:\tab\b0 Mills-Curran, Bill\par \b Subject:\tab\b0 color test\par \pard\cf0\f1 It\rquote s not easy being \cf2 green.\par \par \pard\fi-1800\li1800\tx1800\cf1\f0\par } **************************************************************** So, perhaps this is a mime problem with fetchmail? Or, is IMAP still a possible offender? Thanks, Bill

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 10:07:46AM -0400, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}{\f1\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}}

If you are getting the RTF through, can you view the RTF in e.g. OpenOffice? Does Linux support the Windows-1252 character set and the given fonts?