Re: Attachments

[email protected] writes:

> As far as I understand Outlook, it only uses the three letters after the . 
> (period) in order to select the proper program. When the managers/editors I 
> work with get a .dat file and Outlook/Windows cannot open it directly, 
> they'll discard it and just say "I cannot open it - send it again".

Tell them the file is fine, and it's a bug in Outlook.  Which it is.

> But where in the transfer is the file change modified? It is Cone or 
> Outlook?

Outlook.  Outlook is broken, and can't read the attachment's filename, so it 
picks ATT<RANDOM>.DAT as the default.  Cone generates the following MIME 
headers for a typical PDF attachment:

Content-Disposition: attachment;
  FILENAME="filename.pdf"
Content-Type: application/pdf; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

It would be anyone's guess as to what Outlook's possible beef with this, is. 
These headers are valid, but I can imagine at least three possible bugs in 
Outlook:

1)  The Content-Disposition: header comes before the Content-Type: header.

2)  The "FILENAME" parameter, that gives the attachment's filename, is in 
uppercase and Outlook expects to see a lowercase parameter filename

3)  Outlook gets confused by the "charset" parameter in the Content-Type: 
header.

In all cases it's an Outlook bug.  The relative order of MIME headers is 
irrelevant.  MIME parameters are case-insensitive, and unknown MIME 
parameters are to be ignored.

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