Windows Mobile 5 - HTML formatted message

[kevindods]

Hi all

I have been checking IMAP access with a WM5 PDA and I find that email sent in html format arriving in my Zimbra account can appear blank in the Mobile Outlook. Checking WM5 against HTML messages in Exchange and other imap accounts they come through OK in Mobile Outlook, just seems to be the ones from Zimbra that disappear. Using OSS 3 - 160build.

2003se edition was fine and receives those same HTML messages fine from Zimbra, however something odd is happening with the combination Zimbra+WM5...

Any ideas? Will make a difference to many if email ends up arriving emtpy on when on the road! ;-)

Kevin

[KevinH]

Can you post some example messages. I've seen this too on my PDA but in most cases they are not Zimbra generated mail. If you have some Zimbra generated mail or a way to replicate it please post that to bugzilla.

[kevindods]

Hi Kevin

Anytime I send a message from Zimbra mail client in HTML the PDA cant see it. Even if it is just test formatting!

Same message sent via exchange 5.5 or 2K3 it is received fin by WM5.

Anything else useful I can post here or in Bugzilla? Nothing looks unusual particularly - see below:

HTML message carries:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_Part_3_22764575.1142872432256"
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-3.816 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6 autolearn=ham
tests=[ALL_TRUSTED=-1.8, AWL=0.582, BAYES_00=-2.599, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001]
X-Spam-Score: -3.816
X-Spam-Level:

------=_Part_3_22764575.1142872432256
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


Testing simple HTML meesage


From a Zimbra account back to the originator with no other mail system involved.

And CC'd to Exchange 5.5 account

------=_Part_3_22764575.1142872432256
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<div style='font-family:Times New Roman, Times, serif;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;'><div style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: bold;">Testing simple HTML meesage</span><br><div style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: bold;"><br>From a Zimbra account back to the originator with no other mail system involved.<br><br>And CC'd to Exchange 5.5 account<br></span></div></div>
------=_Part_3_22764575.1142872432256--

[KevinH]

Can you post the message from Zimbra and a working example from Exchange both as attachments to the bug. This way they are not mangled by bugzilla and we get the full message mime to test with.

[kevindods]

Bug report 6582

Let me know if there is anything else I can do.

kevin

[eddie]

I have seen this as well. It seems to affect any multipart mime message. Even on messages with no html content... i.e. text body with text attachement, the message body is never displayed on wm5. the attachement can be seen by clicking the attachement but body is missing. I've traced the only thing that zimbra seems to do is removing the Content-Length: and Lines: headers. Perhaps WM5 depends on these.

[KevinH]

Yep the WM5 IMAP client seems to barf on any multi-part message. In the next release we'll have a /wm modifier you can add to your username in the IMAP client. This will convert the message to a single part for display on the WM5 devices. Seems to work pretty well from my testing.

[eddie]

Thanks for the quick response Kevin. I don't think it's a general multi-part handling issue with WM5 though. I ran another test by setting up an off-site account that does not use zimbra, sent identical test emails to both accounts simultaneously, and checked both accounts on the same WM5 device. Here are descriptions of each test email and the result for each server:

Plain text message (no mime encap)
zimbra - displayed fine
non-zim - displayed fine

Multi-part mime message with no html (body with single text attachement)
zimbra - body of message not displayed but attachment can be read
non-zim - both body and message displayed as expected

Multi-part mime html message (standard html message generated by kmail)
zimbra - no body displayed and no html available to download or display
non-zim - text body displayed with option of html view

This proves that WM5 *can* handle multipart messages but zimbra is doing something to the message that WM5 doesn't like. As I mentioned in my previous post, it looks like zimbra is removing the Content-Length: and Lines: headers which WM5 may actually require when processing multipart messages. Is there a way to configure zimbra not to delete those headers so we can run a test?

As usual.. thanks in advance for the help.

:edit to make more readable:

[eddie]

Please ignore my previous theory regarding content-lenth and lines fields. Although my new data shows similar problem but in zimbra's imap implementation specifically. Talking to the imap server directly I get the following.

On Zimbra:
a03 fetch 796 body
* 796 FETCH (BODY (("TEXT" "PLAIN" ("CHARSET" "utf-8") NIL NIL "QUOTED-PRINTABLE" 1104 0)("TEXT" "HTML" ("CHARSET" "utf-8") NIL NIL "QUOTED-PRINTABLE" 1483 0) "ALTERNATIVE"))
a03 OK FETCH completed

According to the rfc the number following the number of octets for each mime section (in this case 1104 and 1483 respectively) is the number of lines. Zimbra returns 0 lines for both mime sections. I'll bet WM5 looks at the number of lines rather than the number of octets so it looks like an empty message.

On non-Zimbra imap:
a04 fetch 1910 body
* 1910 FETCH (BODY (("TEXT" "PLAIN" ("CHARSET" "utf-8") NIL NIL "QUOTED-PRINTABLE" 1104 30)("TEXT" "HTML" ("CHARSET" "utf-8") NIL NIL "QUOTED-PRINTABLE" 1483 33) "ALTERNATIVE"))
a04 OK FETCH completed

Note on the non-zimbra server (where WM5 works fine), it shows the correct number of lines for each section.

[KevinH]

Nice work Eddie. We'll take a look and see why we aren't setting the line count.