On 10/29/2012 08:08 PM, Steven Haigh wrote:
> On 27/10/2012 1:36 PM, Steven Haigh wrote:
>> On 27/10/2012 10:58 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
>>>> Content-Type: application/octet-stream
>>>                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>> This is somewhat odd, I'd expect this to be text/plain or something in
>>> that direction.  But that's set based on the data the mailer receives.
>>> If it contains some control characters or other binary bytes, it might
>>> flip over to octet-stream.
>>>
>>>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
>>>                               ^^^^^^
>>> The mail is encoded as base64.  At first glance, the mail headers looks
>>> appropriate to me.  Which makes me wonder what kind of mail client you
>>> use?

The problem is caused by bad RPMs that write out text during install/update/etc
and that text happens to contain non printable ASCII characters (like a carriage
return character or some garbage like that).  The mail program on linux sees
these characters and automatically converts the mail to base64 before sending
it.

The patch I have to fix it is to put a " /usr/bin/tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176' " to
filter the yum response before it is mailed.  Works for me :

--- /etc/cron.daily/yum-autoupdate.bak  2012-09-10 10:25:37.000000000 -0400
+++ /etc/cron.daily/yum-autoupdate      2012-09-25 14:55:11.535869852 -0400
@@ -322,7 +323,7 @@
                                                        echo " Mail Needs To Be Sent"
                                                        echo "  /bin/mail -s \"YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY\" $MAILLIST "
                                                fi
-                                               cat $TEMPMAILFILE | /bin/mail -s "YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY" $MAILLIST
+                                               cat $TEMPMAILFILE | /usr/bin/tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176' | /bin/mail -s
"YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY" $MAILLIST
                                        fi
                                else
                                        if [ "$DEBUG" = "true" ] ; then
@@ -330,7 +331,7 @@
                                                echo "   Mail Needs To Be Sent"
                                                echo "    /bin/mail -s \"YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY\" $MAILLIST "
                                        fi
-                                       cat $TEMPMAILFILE | /bin/mail -s "YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY" $MAILLIST
+                                       cat $TEMPMAILFILE | /usr/bin/tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176' | /bin/mail -s
"YUM:$HOSTNAME:$TODAY" $MAILLIST
                                fi
                        fi
                fi

-- 

Andrew Schretter
Systems Programmer, Duke University
Dept. of Mathematics (919) 660-2866