email getting chopped with one ISP

[jatar_k]

So I have a lovely little html email that goes out to anyone who fills in an online payroll system.

Interestingly annoying thing is with one particular host it chops it in half. Stops in the middle of the email they get four days worth of data and it just stops.

I have looked through everything I can think of and it seems to bear no rhyme or reason and it works with any other ISP.

any thoughts?

[DrDoc]

Do they have any set timeout for how long it may take a script to execute? Do they have any max size for packages sent through sendmail?

[oilman]

This is a system jatar built for me...so I'll weigh in here too

the issue isn't on the host side - the script executes perfectly and the sending is no problem for 95% of the employees. It's the employees using a particular ISP here in town that aren't receiving their full emails. The email is truncated at exactly the same spot every single time for people using this ISP.

The email itself is quite small - no images at all. And only used html for simple layout purposes. The email itself us under 10K in size.

[bird]

What does "truncated at exactly the same spot" mean? Are the messages all identical? Are they chopped within the same word? After the same amount of bytes?

Do those recipients see messages from other sources arriving intact?

[oilman]

>truncated
chopped off at the same spot. It always comes at the end of the fourth day and cuts off within a few characters each time. I double checked - not the EXACT same spot but very close.

I can only assume that they recieve other email correctly. It is a major ISP that sends out it's own html emails on a regular basis to its customers etc.

[daisho]

Hey Guys,

Can you give me an example of the full email and the truncated email?

Also is the ISP running Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix or something else?

daisho.

[jim_w]

I don’t know if this makes sense or not, but it is what I would do…

I would take the HTML and send it to one of the email addresses via outlook express several times relaying through the host. This could tell you if it is because of header information or perhaps because it is automated vs. a ‘hand’ send html email? Try same thing using an yahoo email address as the from. This should check if it is on the outgoing or incoming side?

[jatar_k]

it would seem they use iPlanet Messaging Server, Sun is messing with me again, no surprise there.

I have a log to trap any errors on the mail(). Nothing in there. I haven't gotten them to check the actual mail logs on the server, will do that.

The extra headers I set are
From: [e-mail]\r\nContent-type: text/html\r\n

The actual email is 3 paragraphs in a spanned row, then a table with maybe 20 rows (4 tds each, a few spans). I send the html email because there is a lot of calculation to do and if I use html then I can display it on the confirmation page then send it straight from there, same data.

On the truncated email it shows the paragraphs and then cuts the message on the last </td> in the 5th row. It cuts it somewhere in that /td though exactly where changes by a char or two.

[DaveN]

I think I know this one.

Because you are using Html the email gets fired as one long string some mail servers only allow a certain length because they can't parse it properly. string lengths of 256 char or if you want to be really save 128

if i'm wrong i'll hang my head in shame. and Oilman wont have to buy me all those beers he owes me.

Dave

[jatar_k]

interesting answer

This ISP truncates emails at 1000 characters if it doesn't get a carriage return in there somewhere - the SMTP RFC states that a paragraph should be under 1000 characters - tho most isps ignore that of course This ISP doesn't.

I will have to see if this works later.

so Dave is right. ;)

[oilman]

dang! and I owe Dave a lot of beers :) maybe since they are cutting at 1000 and Dave was off on the number I'll only pay up for half the beer ;)

[DaveN]

I'll only be drunk for a week them ;)

dave