tnef support for recognising / handling e-mail bodies in TNEF format

Question

tnef support for recognising / handling e-mail bodies in TNEF format

martin-cs opened this issue 6 years ago · comments

Hi,
I've been having issue with TNEF format and thought it best to write up what I've found so far. I've been receiving e-mail from a colleague running what I suspect to be a newer Microsoft mail client. These have an "attachment" in TNEF format which (with the aid of a hex editor) turns out to be the HTML formatted (ofcourse) contents of the e-mail. tnef silently "fails" to handle these because:

*. TNEF key is 695e rather than 363
*. There is no attATTACHRENDDATA 0x9002 object, so no file is set-up and hence there is no output, debug or otherwise.
*. However the 0x9003 field is still present and contains a byte stream which is the e-mail.

I'll see if I can get you an example.

Although it may be outside of scope of tnef, would it be possible to warn in verbose or debug mode that the winmail.dat file is not empty but does not contain an attachment? Thanks.

Mark Simpson · Answer 1 · Sat May 26 2018 00:19:02 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Please give me an example I'll need it for testing and investigation. Especially good would be an example file that I could include in the project for my automated tests.

It could be that the TNEF format has been changed (thus the change in key) - I'll need to research that.

If you can, it would be interesting to see if --save-body option of tnef could be used to get the HTML body out (after working around the key issue...)

Martin · Answer 2 · Sat May 26 2018 00:41:56 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

On Fri, 2018-05-25 at 09:19 -0700, Mark Simpson wrote: Please give me an example I'll need it for testing and investigation. Especially good would be an example file that I could include in the project for my automated tests. It could be that the TNEF format has been changed (thus the change in key) - I'll need to research that. If you can, it would be interesting to see if `--save-body` option of tnef could be used to get the HTML body out (after working around the key issue...)

Thanks for the prompt response. If you send me an e-mail address I'll send over an example.

Mark Simpson · Answer 3 · Sat May 26 2018 02:39:17 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Please email me the example at verdammelt@gmail.com

Mark Simpson · Answer 4 · Sun Jun 24 2018 22:06:50 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

It looks like the examle file ended up in my spam folder (thanks gmail!). I will try to review it soon.

Martin · Answer 5 · Thu Jul 05 2018 17:22:36 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Oh the irony! Thanks for chasing this.

Martin · Answer 6 · Wed Jul 11 2018 17:40:24 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

On Sun, 2018-06-24 at 07:06 -0700, Mark Simpson wrote: It looks like the examle file ended up in my spam folder (thanks gmail!). I will try to review it soon.

I've sent you some more (no hassle / urgency) and just in case GMail decides to eat them ... you've got mail.

Mark Simpson · Answer 7 · Thu Jul 12 2018 09:41:22 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I got them - thanks. And, hopefully I'll get a chance to look at them soon. Sorry for the delay.

Martin · Answer 8 · Sun Jul 15 2018 17:21:31 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

On Wed, 2018-07-11 at 18:41 -0700, Mark Simpson wrote: I got them - thanks. And, hopefully I'll get a chance to look at them soon. Sorry for the delay.

No worries; no urgency.

Mark Simpson · Answer 9 · Thu Jul 19 2018 10:04:16 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I have taken a look at the 3 data files you have sent me. In no case have I had any particular problem using tnef to process the files. In no case were there any problems with the TNEF keys.

The first file (which you sent to me in a compressed tar archive contained an RTF message body which matches the body.rtf file you sent me.

The second and third (which you sent me as copies of email messages - I extracted the attachment and base64-decoded them...) contained HTML message bodies.

I was using tnef version 1.4.17 which is the latest version (released on 2018-01-13) on the MacOSX platform. What version and OS are you using?

Martin · Answer 10 · Mon Jul 23 2018 20:34:41 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

On Wed, 2018-07-18 at 19:04 -0700, Mark Simpson wrote: I have taken a look at the 3 data files you have sent me. In no case have I had any particular problem using `tnef` to process the files. In no case were there any problems with the TNEF keys. The first file (which you sent to me in a compressed tar archive contained an RTF message body which matches the `body.rtf` file you sent me. The second and third (which you sent me as copies of email messages - I extracted the attachment and base64-decoded them...) contained HTML message bodies. I was using `tnef` version `1.4.17` which is the latest version (released on 2018-01-13) on the MacOSX platform. What version and OS are you using?

1.4.17 on Debian Stretch. When I opened this I didn't know about -- save-body / that TNEF can contain things other than attachments. I think this may have been the original issue as there was a non- trivially sized TNEF that the tools couldn't extract any attachments from. Thanks for looking at this. I'm happy for you to close this for now and if I run into similar issues again I will open another issue. Cheers, - Martin

Mark Simpson · Answer 11 · Tue Jul 24 2018 22:19:46 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Excellent! Glad it was just a misunderstanding / poorly advertised features. Sorry it took so long to figure that out.