Sending attachments with elm - corrupted format

[Tirza Kiesler]

We send financial reports in ELM attachement. The source is an ASCII file, where all the amounts are displayed in columns, and the amounts are right justified. When we open the attachment in e-mail, the spaces between the columns have been shrinked, and the columns look like snakes. Any clue?

[Mark Grant]

My first question would be if the columns are lined up with tabs or spaces and you are using a mail reader that defaults to html? If you look at an ascii file as html it will look as you describe.

[Tirza Kiesler]

The columns are lined up with spaces, not tabs. The mail reader doesn't default to html.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It's possible that tabs have been expanded to spaces but this may simply be an artifact of your methods of viewing the file on different platforms. The only way to know for sure is to use a tool like od or hexedit that will allow you to see the ASCII characters as well as the octal/hex values. You then compare the original to the received file.


You might also change the attachment instructions to:
[include myfile1 application/octet-stream base64]

so that myfile1 will be sent and converted on the receiving end exactly as it was.

[Steven E. Protter]

I ran into this problem with elm as well.

It was actually the Symantec firewall that was mishandling the attadhments. It required a software patch.

If you use the DS directive in sendmail to relay mail off an smtp server, you need to have that checked.

I'm attaching a production sendmail script that will assist in testing.

SEP

[Tirza Kiesler]

Where can I see the attachment (sorry, it's my first time in the forum...)

Can you also give more details about the patch?