[psalm121]

I narrowed down the problem to a design issue with 64 bit decoder within the Java language itself.

The default behaviour is to throw an exception when it encounters a fault in the 64 bit encoded stream. This is very strict behaviour and causes a problem when turned on for end users as it's very hard to guarantee that there will be no errors in an encoded stream bearing in mind the number of different methods people are using to send email (the most problematic being custom hand coded methods like messages sent from websites using php etc. ) Most mail clients do not have this strict behaviour when interepreting 64 encoded data and so ignore the error, this usually does not cause a problem as the error is almost always at the end of the stream after the important data.

This strict behaviour can be turned off by setting a system property for Java, the one I mentioned in my previous post. I think system properties can be set in tomcat, but I haven't figured out where yet!

I think I will post this to bugzilla!

(I'll also try to post to the government department sending the emails out)

Thanks for your help in the first place!