unable to view email because content is in base64

A

Annie Q

Hello,

I'm posting this email on behalf of my coworker. He seemed to received some
of his email garbled - i.e. encoded in base64. Does anyone know why and how
to fix this?

Thanks, Annie
 
V

VanguardLH

Annie said:
Hello,

I'm posting this email on behalf of my coworker. He seemed to received some
of his email garbled - i.e. encoded in base64. Does anyone know why and how
to fix this?

Thanks, Annie

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278134
So tell the sender to use a language the recipient can read.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927092
What happens when the sender sends a non-signed, non-encrypted e-mail?
Could be the sender is using some spammifying freebie e-mail provider
(i.e., they append some promotional spam onto an outbound e-mail) which
corrupts the encrypted e-mail (because the spam got added at the server
after the e-mail was encrypted at the client). A digital signature will
be invalidated if the e-mail is changed (the hash computed for the
message won't match) and that will happen with a freebie e-mail provider
that spammifies your outbound e-mails sent through them.

If your coworker has any software on his host that inspects his e-mail
traffic, like anti-virus, anti-malware, or anti-spam programs, have him
disable its e-mail scanning (although for some products that requires
uninstalling the product and doing a custom install to NOT included the
product's e-mail scan component). Could be these products are corrupted
the content of the e-mail (assuming the sender's e-mail client didn't
screw up the MIME part for the attachment).

Sounds like the boundaries of the Base 64 encoded block are missing, so
the recipient sees the data block because the MIME header for it is
missing (to identify to the e-mail client that it is a Base 64 encoded
block). You'll have to look at the raw source of the e-mail to see if
the MIME header (in the body) is missing or incomplete. Retrieving the
e-mail into Outlook Express is best to see the actual raw source of an
e-mail. Base 64 converts 8-bit characters into 7-bit ASCII characters
but the MIME header is needed to identify that the text block is an
encoded block.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
 
A

Annie Q

Hi, Vanguard,

Thanks for your reply. The email is in English, and the content type is
text/plain, and is not a multipart email message. It's non signed and non
encrypted too.

Annie
 

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