attachment options?

attachment options?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I have a Kindle 3, and you can email yourself documents at a kindle
email address to have them converted into a readable format and then
delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. I've found that attaching Word docs
to messages and sending them from gnus doesn't work: Amazon bounces me a
message saying there was no attachment on the email. The same message
with the same file sent from gmail's web interface works.

I am attaching the file to the gnus message with all the defaults:
Content type is application/msword and disposition is attachment. As far
as I know those are the correct settings for a plain vanilla file
attachment. Amazon's error message doesn't say anything beyond "no
file", does anyone know of any alternate attachment methods I could use,
or other settings to tweak, to make these attachments more attachment-y?

Any advice appreciated,

Eric

Re: attachment options?

[Steinar Bang]

Maybe something between you and amazon strips the attachment?  Perhaps a
virus filter?

Have your tried changing the content type to "application/octet-stream"?

Maybe you need to zip the attachment?  Will Amazon be able to understand
that?

Re: attachment options?

[Frank Schmitt]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> I have a Kindle 3, and you can email yourself documents at a kindle
> email address to have them converted into a readable format and then
> delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. I've found that attaching Word docs
> to messages and sending them from gnus doesn't work: Amazon bounces me a
> message saying there was no attachment on the email. The same message
> with the same file sent from gmail's web interface works.
>
> I am attaching the file to the gnus message with all the defaults:
> Content type is application/msword and disposition is attachment. As far
> as I know those are the correct settings for a plain vanilla file
> attachment. Amazon's error message doesn't say anything beyond "no
> file", does anyone know of any alternate attachment methods I could use,
> or other settings to tweak, to make these attachments more attachment-y?

Is point at the very end of the message when you attach the file? Even
after the signature? Otherwise the last part of the mail isn't the word
document but a text/plain part...

-- 
Have you ever considered how much text can fit in eighty columns?  Given that a
signature typically contains up to four lines of text, this space allows you to
attach a tremendous amount of valuable information to your messages.  Seize the
opportunity and don't waste your signature on bullshit that nobody cares about.

Re: attachment options?

[Andreas Schwab]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> I am attaching the file to the gnus message with all the defaults:
> Content type is application/msword and disposition is attachment. As far
> as I know those are the correct settings for a plain vanilla file
> attachment. Amazon's error message doesn't say anything beyond "no
> file", does anyone know of any alternate attachment methods I could use,
> or other settings to tweak, to make these attachments more attachment-y?

Do you put anything besides the attachment into the mail?  If not then
gnus generates a single-part message which contains the attachment
contents as the whole body.  Probably Amazon's parser is too lame to
handle that.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: attachment options?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Fri, Sep 17 2010, Steinar Bang wrote:

> Maybe something between you and amazon strips the attachment?  Perhaps a
> virus filter?
>
> Have your tried changing the content type to "application/octet-stream"?
>
> Maybe you need to zip the attachment?  Will Amazon be able to understand
> that?

Thanks to all for the suggestions! I've tried
"application/octet-stream", putting the attachment very last, and
zipping it, and so far only zipping the attachment has worked -- in all
other cases it has failed silently, or with a very unhelpful error
message. So that's a solution found, anyway! Still be nice to know
what's really going on, though...

Thanks again,
Eric

Re: attachment options?

[Dave Goldberg]

> So that's a solution found, anyway! Still be nice to know
> what's really going on, though...

You say it works from gmail?  Perhaps it would help to try sending it
to another address (perhaps as a CC) from gmail and seeing what the
structure looks like.

-- 
Dave Goldberg
david.goldberg6@verizon.net

Re: attachment options?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Sun, Sep 19 2010, Dave Goldberg wrote:

>> So that's a solution found, anyway! Still be nice to know
>> what's really going on, though...
>
> You say it works from gmail?  Perhaps it would help to try sending it
> to another address (perhaps as a CC) from gmail and seeing what the
> structure looks like.

Yeah, I guess I could have done that to begin with, right? So I emailed
myself a document twice, once from gmail's webmail, once from gnus, both
messages received in gnus. Due to my amazingly bad short-term memory I
used different DOC files, but they were both in Chinese, should have
been the same encoding for the file itself. Here are the two raw
messages as received in Gnus (left out some headers, hopefully this is
everything relevant). I just don't know enough about the email format to
see what's going on.

*****
MESSAGE FROM GMAIL WEBMAIL
*****

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=001485f1e28ae1aecd049096dfdd
X-Content-Length: 90979
Lines: 1189
Xref: zerihar mail.misc:5637

--001485f1e28ae1aecd049096dfdd
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Here's the document from gmail.

--001485f1e28ae1aecd049096dfdd
Content-Type: application/msword; name="=?UTF-8?B?54i25Lqy5LygLmRvYw==?="
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="=?UTF-8?B?54i25Lqy5LygLmRvYw==?="
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
X-Attachment-Id: f_ge9ixieu0

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAfQAAAAAAAAAA
******
ELIDED ATTACHMENT
******
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==
--001485f1e28ae1aecd049096dfdd--
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

******
GNUS MESSAGE
******

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="=-=-="
X-Content-Length: 32129
Lines: 428
Xref: zerihar mail.misc:5639

--=-=-=
Content-Type: text/plain

This is a doc file sent from Gnus.

--=-=-=
Content-Type: application/msword
Content-Disposition: attachment;
 filename*0*=utf-8''%e8%ae%a9%e6%9b%b4%e5%a4%9a%e7%9a%84%e4%ba%ba%e7%9c%8b;
 filename*1*=%e5%88%b0%e7%81%ab%e8%bd%a6.doc
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAKQAAAAAAAAAA
******
ELIDED ATTACHMENT
******
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=
--=-=-=--
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Re: attachment options?

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="=?UTF-8?B?54i25Lqy5LygLmRvYw==?="

[...]

> Content-Disposition: attachment;
>  filename*0*=utf-8''%e8%ae%a9%e6%9b%b4%e5%a4%9a%e7%9a%84%e4%ba%ba%e7%9c%8b;
>  filename*1*=%e5%88%b0%e7%81%ab%e8%bd%a6.doc

This has to be the culprit.  Gnus uses RFC2231 encoding on file names:

(rfc2231-encode-string "filename" "héllo")
=> "filename*=iso-8859-1''h%e9llo"

While Gmail just RFC2047-encodes the file name.

I think Gnus should just do the same.  I don't think RFC2231 encoding
ever took off.  I'll check in a fix.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: attachment options?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Sun, Sep 19 2010, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:

 > Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="=?UTF-8?B?54i25Lqy5LygLmRvYw==?="
>
> [...]
>
>> Content-Disposition: attachment;
>>  filename*0*=utf-8''%e8%ae%a9%e6%9b%b4%e5%a4%9a%e7%9a%84%e4%ba%ba%e7%9c%8b;
>>  filename*1*=%e5%88%b0%e7%81%ab%e8%bd%a6.doc
>
> This has to be the culprit.  Gnus uses RFC2231 encoding on file names:
>
> (rfc2231-encode-string "filename" "héllo")
> => "filename*=iso-8859-1''h%e9llo"
>
> While Gmail just RFC2047-encodes the file name.
>
> I think Gnus should just do the same.  I don't think RFC2231 encoding
> ever took off.  I'll check in a fix.

I didn't understand any of that besides "I'll check in a fix", but I
guess that's the important part! Thanks very much…

Eric

Re: attachment options?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Sun, Sep 19 2010, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="=?UTF-8?B?54i25Lqy5LygLmRvYw==?="
>
> [...]
>
>> Content-Disposition: attachment;
>>  filename*0*=utf-8''%e8%ae%a9%e6%9b%b4%e5%a4%9a%e7%9a%84%e4%ba%ba%e7%9c%8b;
>>  filename*1*=%e5%88%b0%e7%81%ab%e8%bd%a6.doc
>
> This has to be the culprit.  Gnus uses RFC2231 encoding on file names:
>
> (rfc2231-encode-string "filename" "héllo")
> => "filename*=iso-8859-1''h%e9llo"
>
> While Gmail just RFC2047-encodes the file name.
>
> I think Gnus should just do the same.  I don't think RFC2231 encoding
> ever took off.  I'll check in a fix.

Just noting that this did the trick, Amazon recognizes attachments
properly now…