Attachments from Opera 10.53 emails get renamed when recipients use Microsoft Outlook 2007

Attachments from Opera 10.53 emails get renamed when recipients use Microsoft Outlook 2007

Hi,

Using Opera 10.53 on Windows XP, it has come to my knowledge that MS Outlook 2007 recipients of my emails don't receive the attachments as expected. If I send e.g. "test.txt", those who use Outlook will get the file as "ATTXXXXX.txt" where XXXXX is a number, e.g. 00140. I have confirmed this to be an Opera issue rather than an Outlook issue, as there is no problem with emails sent from other clients such as Thunderbird. Also, this problem only seems to arise when I send to Outlook users.

I.e.
Opera → Outlook = problem
Opera → Webmail such as Gmail = no problem
Opera → Thunderbird = no problem
Thunderbird → Outlook = no problem
Outlook → Outlook = no problem
Outlook → Opera = no problem

Has anyone else encountered this? It's very annoying since the file name of the attachments is important in many cases.

Thanks.

I've encountered this when sending attachments to Outlook that have Unicode chars in the filename. But, that happened when sending with Sylpheed too (when using the non-default 'Use RFC2231 headers' option) and was because of a bug in Outlook where it didn't support RFC2231 filename parameter values.

I forget what Thunderbird does (it probably just mime-encodes the non-ascii filename value), but try in Sylpheed with the RFC2231 option on to see if you can reproduce too, as Opera follows RFC2231 I believe and Outlook does not.

If this is really happening with just "test.txt", I can't see why. I'm assuming thought that you were just using "test.txt" as an example in your post.

I noticed when looking in Outlook 2007 settings the other day there is clearly something in there designed to mess around with the HTML of emails. (I was looking at this after noticing font issues when I am emailing some Outlook 2007 users)

Outlook Tools Menu \ Options....
Select Mail Format page
Notice the "HTML format" section.

There are two options in here that may be part of the problem.

"Reduce the file size of the message by removing formatting information that is not necessary to display the email message"
and "Rely on CSS for font formatting"

If this is messing with the fonts, it may also be messing with other HTML code.

=+=+

Also remember you can look at the RAW SOURCE of the emails that are sent out. Look in Opera's Sent Items folder and check out the outgoing email (right click the title bar and "View all headers and message"). There is a similar option in Outlook (just more buried)

Even if you don't know HTML, you can scan through looking for your filename.

=+=+

What happens if you send Plain Text emails? Do the attachments arrive correctly then?

Thank you for your replies.

Yes, "test.txt" was just an example of my post, but the problem occurs when attaching files with similar, simple names. Today I made some more tests both with Opera and Sylpheed, and surprisingly, it worked now. The attachments were not renamed when my "Outlook colleague" received the email/file. I always send emails as plain text by the way.

Looking in Opera's "Sent" folder reveals that all attachments have the correct name when leaving my outbox... so really, it should be something in Outlook that messes with emails sent from Opera.

Ah, I found it! It is those non-English characters I use that causes Outlook to rename attachments sent from Opera. E.g. if a file name contains 'å', 'ä' or 'ö' the Outlook user will get the attachment renamed. I also tried sending this to my Gmail (webmail), and there was no renaming. I also know (already when opening this topic) that I sent an attachment containing the 'ö' letter to a Thunderbird user, and that client did not rename the file.

I guess there is a quick and standardized way to report this to Opera as a bug? Or is only Outlook to blame for this?

Worth also checking on the Anti-Virus solutions in place. Some anti-virus products will detach the attachment for scanning, and that may be fussy about short filenames.


You can also check the raw message source in Outlook. This changes in the different versions, but what I just found in Outlook 2007 is:

Just the mail headers in Outlook 2007
Locate your message in the Inbox.
Now Right Click and select Message Options.
This gets you just the mail header, but not the raw source of the whole message.

Full Email Source in Outlook 2007
In Outlook 2007, open an email to view either in the Preview Pane or double click to open in a separate window.
Now Right Click in the middle of your message window.
Pop-up menu includes the option to "View Source..."

It is big and messy and lots of HTML - but you should be able to read it through enough to locate the file name.

Originally posted by LeoniAquila:

Ah, I found it! It is those non-English characters I use that causes Outlook to rename attachments sent from Opera. E.g. if a file name contains 'å', 'ä' or 'ö'

This is down to encoding rules, but I don't know much about which one you should be using.

In Outlook 2007:

Tools Menu, Select Options
On the Mail Format page,
Select International Options

In Opera, this is all on the last page of the mail settings for each account.

On the "Outgoing" page there is an option for the encoding. Mine is currently set to ISO-8859-15 but I cannot tell you what that means.


I would not be surprised if this was an Outlook bug as they are the American's without the extra dots and dashes in their language, whereas Norway has plenty of their own.

Originally posted by LeoniAquila:

Or is only Outlook to blame for this?

I'd need to see the source of one of the messages from Opera to be sure that it's not just a charset issue, but...

It's not an Opera bug. Opera's following rfc2231 here. Outlook doesn't support rfc2231. The reason it works in Thunderbird is that Thunderbird doesn't rfc2231-encode the filename and therefore doesn't trigger the bug in Outlook.

If you want to file a bug, the bug would be a feature request about adding an option to mime-encode the filename instead of rfc2231-encoding the filename (just like Sylpheed has an option to choose between the two). The option could be a global option. Or, it could be a per-contact option, which would make more sense as you'd only want to do this for problem clients like Outlook.

Note that Outlook Express and Internet Explorer have the same problem with rfc2231 filename parameter values. MS just refuses to support them in any of their products. So, it makes no sense to file a bug for Outlook as they won't fix it.

As an example:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=utf-8''%E2%88%9A.txt
Content-Type: text/plain; name*=utf-8''%E2%88%9A.txt
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64

4oia

See the filename*=utf-8''%E2%88%9A.txt? Outlook doesn't support that way of encoding. Outlook needs it to be like filename="=?utf-8?B?4oiaLnR4dA==?=".

If you look at the message source that Opera sends out and compare it with what Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Outlook send out, you can confirm if this is the issue you're having or not for sure.

Originally posted by burnout426:

MS just refuses to support them in any of their products.

The problem with US based software assuming everything is ASCII. I guess there are just as many problems with Russian or Greek filenames.

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=4450811

I remember this problem was there back in the last Century when I was using Netscape mail in a company based around MS Exchange. Outlook has always had it's own ways of doing things. Assuming the world is American.


I wonder how it will now handle this kind of stuff? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10100108.stm Website URLs finally appearing fully in Arabic text...

One more from an Opera dev who wrote a lot of the header handling code:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=105320

I find that all English (non-unicode), MS Word .docx files attached to my Opera emails, are being received as ATTXXXXXX.dat by my Outlook using colleagues.

Very disturbing - I wish there were a solution.

Originally posted by Shoham:

I find that all English (non-unicode), MS Word .docx files attached to my Opera emails, are being received as ATTXXXXXX.dat by my Outlook using colleagues.

Very disturbing - I wish there were a solution.

Would have to see the source of a sent message that caused this first.

This is how it looks from the Outlook side:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD></HEAD>
<BODY style="font-family:'Calibri'; font-size:14px"><DIV>Dear All,</DIV><DIV><BR></DIV><DIV>After reviewing the current state of implementation of the mailshot procedure several problems are apparent, the primary one being that there is too much time</DIV><DIV>between the initiation of the process and the planned launch.</DIV><DIV><BR></DIV><DIV>I would like to propose a condensed procedure hereby attached, which Clare & I hope is a more workable one.</DIV><DIV><BR></DIV><DIV>Please review it and give me your inputs by Tuesday so that we may proceed to share it with the project teams.</DIV><DIV><BR></DIV><DIV><BR>Best regards,<BR> </DIV><DIV><BR></DIV><DIV id="M2Signature"><DIV>





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