mail without body tag in spam quarantine: "unable to parse mail"

[sherminator]

Hi there,

we received a solicited mail that doesn't contain a body tag. And there is a file attached. PMG classified the mail as spam (which is not a problem for us).
PMG's WebGUI (Administration -> Spam Quarantine) says "unable to parse mail", and at the bottom of the window there is "No Attachments". When we expand this line and check "Show all Parts" the attachment is shown correctly.

Probably a not so important corner case (the sender says that it's an automatically generated mail from its ERP), but maybe you would like to treat it better?

Thanks and greets
Stephan

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

Hm - not 100% sure how to improve on that - but I see the point

could share some kind of testcase (a minimal mail with a similar structure, which does not contain any sensitive data (also e-mail metadata as addresses, ips,...) - as .eml - this would make it far easier to see what we can do here.

 

[sherminator]

How can I send you an example? I tried starting a "conversation" with you, but it seems I'm not allowed to do so.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

How can I send you an example? I tried starting a "conversation" with you, but it seems I'm not allowed to do so.

Yes - it's a channel I've disabled - since most of my communication happens via e-mail:
s.ivanov _at_ proxmox.com

Thanks!

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

Thanks for the mail - to rephrase the original report a bit in other words:
The mail has no multipart/mixed, and not text/* parts - but only a application/pdf as sole body-part.

I'd agree that this is quite a corner case (I think at least this might be the first time I've encountered something like that ).

See https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pmg-gui.git;a=commitdiff;h=db3264f2eeed5f29ae175c0c55972f042ff80733 for a bit of context on how the GUI handles that and for the backend:
https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pmg-api....f64cb0a0cd558cf29261261b6f31a93a;hb=HEAD#l948

most e-mail has at least some minimal text/plain and/or text/html part as one of the top mime-parts - and this is what most mail-clients display directly - and attachments should have their content-disposition set accordingly.

The only improvement I might imagine for this case might be to somehow enable the show all parts checkbox automatically in case there is no text/plain part - but I really do assume that this is nothing happening too often - thus I'd leave it as is for now.

(btw. how does your mailclient display this?)

 

[sherminator]

Thanks a lot for the explanations!

I'd agree that this is quite a corner case (I think at least this might be the first time I've encountered something like that ).

me too. The sender told us that the mail was generated by their SAP - and therefore it's correct by definition.

(btw. how does your mailclient display this?)

MS Outlook 2019 and Mozilla Thunderbird 115 show a blank body and the attachment - as normal user would "expect".