[Xymon] xymon e-mail alerts show up as attachments instead of e-mail

[Thomas Leavitt]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm seeing similar behavior.

We recently migrated our SMTP server to Exim4 on Ubuntu.

I noticed a flood of error messages in the logs related to bb-test not
waiting for the SMTP servers's response to each command before sending
the next one. I researched this a bit, and both commented out the
"send" part of the test, per earlier comments, and set
"smtp_enforce_sync" to "false".

As a result, it appears that the body of my Xymon email alerts (as
delivered to my client's gmail account) is now seen as a binary
attachment, called "noname". If you "show original", the text of the
body doesn't show up. The attachment can be opened in Notepad, I see
what looks like linefeeds with no carriage returns in the body of that
message. If you look at the headers of gmail, you see this line:

User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 6/20/10

Which makes me thing that Google / Gmail has the same problem as seen below.

Any fix that will both stop the annoying flood of messages in my smtp
server log, while also avoid the annoying changes to Xymon alerts?

Thomas

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Scott Pfister <icepickjazz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not a wild thought.  Yes you are correct.  I was getting ready to post my
> findings.  We recently moved our xymon server from fedora core 3 to SLES 11.
> Fedora used mail and SLES 11 mail is linked to mailx.  The windows clients
> are sending carriage returns in the status ^M (carriage return).  The
> problem occured on SuSe server but not on redhat server, because mailx
> expects input text to be in Unix format, with lines separated by newline
> (^J, \n) characters only. Non-Unix text files that use carriage return (^M,
> \r) characters in addition will be treated as binary data.  Hence the reason
> we get notifications that show up as attachments. Also explains why AIX
> servers don't have the problem and the windows servers do.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 9:36 PM, Scott Pfister <icepickjazz at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Not a wild thought.  Yes you are correct.  I was getting ready to post my
>> findings.  We recently moved our xymon server from fedora core 3 to SLES 11.
>> Fedora used mail and SLES 11 mail is linked to mailx.  The windows clients
>> are sending carriage returns in the status ^M (carriage return).  The
>> problem occured on SuSe server but not on redhat server, because mailx
>> expects input text to be in Unix format, with lines separated by newline
>> (^J, \n) characters only. Non-Unix text files that use carriage return (^M,
>> \r) characters in addition will be treated as binary data.  Hence the reason
>> we get notifications that show up as attachments. Also explains why AIX
>> servers don't have the problem and the windows servers do.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wild thought - could the  Windows reports be turned into attachments in
>>> your email server and/or client because the line-ends are <cr><lf> instead
>>> of just <lf> ??
>>>
>>> Ralph Mitchell
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Scott Pfister <icepickjazz at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Good day,
>>>>
>>>> We are running xymon 4.2.3 and are experiencing some particularities
>>>> with e-mail alerts showing up as attachments like att00001.bin instead of
>>>> the normal message.  The problem is sporadic.  For example windows server
>>>> throws CPU alter.  E-mail sent shows up as an attachment in the recipient
>>>> e-mail.  AIX servers throw cpu alerts don't experience this problem.  Client
>>>> shouldn't matter.  Any tips for troubleshooting this issue?   If we open the
>>>> attachment in the editor it shows what should be in the body of the email.
>>>> Hobbit server is running postfix.
>>>>
>>>> red Mon Sep 19 15:07:50 EDT 2011 [indyctx8.companyname.com] up: 10:12, 1
>>>> users, 224 procs, load=100%, PhysicalMem: 3072MB(74%)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Memory Statistics
>>>> Total Physical memory:          3220598784 bytes (3.00GB)
>>>> Available Physical memory:       850558976 bytes (812.00MB)
>>>> Total PageFile size:            4294967295 bytes (4.00GB)
>>>> Available PageFile size:        4294967295 bytes (4.00GB)
>>>> Total Virtual memory size:      2147352576 bytes (2.00GB)
>>>> Available Virtual memory size:  2106589184 bytes (1.96GB)
>>>>
>>>> Most active processes
>>>> 96.23%    oexplore (0x26a4 [9892])
>>>> 00.60%    svchost (0xbf0 [3056])
>>>> 00.32%    lsass (0x23c [572])
>>>> 00.26%    oexplore (0x29c8 [10696])
>>>> 00.25%    oexplore (0x255c [9564])
>>>> 00.21%    Smc (0x3c4 [964])
>>>> 00.20%    SmcGui (0x3230 [12848])
>>>> 00.19%    oexplore (0x20dc [8412])
>>>> 00.16%    oexplore (0x14d0 [5328])
>>>> 00.13%    XTE (0xfc4 [4036])
>>>>
>>>> See
>>>> http://hobbit.companyname.docm/hobbit-cgi/bb-hostsvc.sh?HOST=indyctx8&SERVICE=cpu
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Scott
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Xymon mailing list
>>>> Xymon at xymon.com
>>>> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
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