RE: Gnats email can't handle attachments?

[Stuart Stevens]

Adam

There is a special section on MIME on the GNATS home page
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnats/ .  See
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnats/mimedecode.html

Text follows:

GNATS > DECODING MIME E-MAIL 

A well-known problem for many users of GNATS is that MIME-ified mail
messages are handled badly by GNATS. MIME is a standard way for "rich"
content to be transferred by e-mail . This content might consist of
arbitrary attachments with content such as images, sounds, executable files
or plain text. A typical MIME e-mail message contains a plaintext part
first, and then one or more parts containing attachments.

Currently, GNATS makes no attempt to decode these messages. This is
especially noticeable when letters such æ, ö, ß, å etc. are used in the
subject field of PRs submitted by e-mail. Such messages get a synopsis
containing the rather ugly looking string "=?iso-8859-1?Q?", underscores
instead of spaces and the special letters themselves replaced by strings
such as =F8, =E8 etc. In the message body, all special characters are
replaced by =XX strings. These strings are commonly referred to as quoted
printables. Thus, quoted printables will also be present in the Description
field of the PR if the message body contained international characters.

Most modern e-mail clients decode MIME e-mail messages properly, removing
the iso string, translating underscores back to spaces and quoted printables
to their special letter counterparts. However, GNATS does not contain
functionality for this, so e-mail messages are filed directly into the
database without any translation.

Another big problem arises when users submit PRs by e-mail, containing
attachments. Those parts of the message that contain binary data is simply
dumped as long encoded blocks of data into the PR description, together with
whatever plaintext the message might contain.

The easiest way to solve this is by placing a parser script at the beginning
of the line in the GNATS mail alias that pipes messages into queue-pr. The
following Perl script uses Perl MIME modules to decode the message. It fully
decodes headers and bodies of messages, stripping out parts of a message
that are not plain text, decoding those parts and saving them to an archive
directory. Separate directories are made to hold the contents of each
message. A reference is then inserted into the original message, stating the
location of the saved file. The parts of the message that were originally in
plaintext get their quoted printables translated and are otherwise left
alone.

In order to use the script below, you need to download and install the
following Perl modules on your system. Get the latest versions listed on the
following pages:

MIME-Base64 
MIME-tools 
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# parsemime.pl -- Yngve Svendsen, May 2001
#
# Script to decode MIME-encoded mail messages. Fully decodes header
# fields according to RFC2047. Merges multi-line header fields into
# single lines. Decodes the message body, saving binary parts to disk.
# Outputs a new message body, consisting of the plaintext message parts
# and references detailing the location of the saved stripped-out
# non-plaintext parts.

use MIME::Parser;
use File::Basename;

undef $/; # We want to treat everything read from STDIN as one line
$input = <>;
$/ = "\n";
($headers, $body) = split (/\n\n/, $input, 2);

# Split MIME-multipart messages and store the parts in subdirectories
# under the directory indicated by $output_path. Depending on which
# mail system your site uses, the directory specified by $output_path might
# have to have special permissions. If you have qmail, the dir should
# be owned by the user 'alias'. Sendmail should be content with 'root'
# as owner.
my $output_path = '/path/to/archive/directory';
my ($parsed) = (basename($0))[0];
my $parser = MIME::Parser->new();

# Permission mask for output files.
# These permissions are very lax. Replace with what is appropriate
# for your system.
$oldumask = umask 0002;

$parser->output_under($output_path);
$parser->output_prefix($parsed);
$parser->output_to_core();

my $entity = $parser->parse_data($input); 
# Permissions for the directory containing the output files.
# These permissions are very lax. Replace with what is appropriate
# for your system.
chmod 0775, ($parser->output_dir);

# Process the headers:
$procheaders = $headers;
$procheaders =~ s/\?=\s\n/\?=\n/g; # Lines ending with an encoded-word
                               # have an extra space at the end. Remove it.
$procheaders =~ s/\n[ |\t]//g; # Merge multi-line headers into a single
line.
$transheaders = '';

foreach $line (split(/\n/, $procheaders))
{
        while ($line =~ m/=\?[^?]+\?(.)\?([^?]*)\?=/)
        {
          $encoding   = $1;
          $txt        = $2;
          $str_before = $`;
          $str_after  = $';

# Base64
    if ($encoding =~ /b/i)
    {
      require MIME::Base64;
      MIME::Base64->import(decode_base64);
      $txt = decode_base64($txt);
    }

# QP
    elsif ($encoding =~ /q/i)
    {
      require MIME::QuotedPrint;
      MIME::QuotedPrint->import(decode_qp);
      $txt = decode_qp($txt);
    }

    $line = $str_before . $txt . $str_after;
  }
  # The decode above does not do underline-to-space translation:
  $line =~ tr/_/ /;
  $transheaders .= $line . "\n";
}

# Reconstruct the message, made from headers and the MIME text parts
# we saved earlier. Add references in the message body to the non-text
# parts that have been stripped out and stored. The purgeable method
# returns the full path of the files constructed from the different
# message parts.
print $transheaders . "\n";

foreach $file ($parser->filer->purgeable) {
    # Strip trailing spaces from filenames:
    $file =~ /(\S*)\s*$/;
    $file = $1;
    if ($file =~ /\.txt\s*$/) {
        # We have found a plaintext part. Include it in the new body:
        open PART, $file;
        while (<PART>) {
            print;
        }
        close PART;
        # Build list of files included in the new body. We will delete
        # these files further down.
        unshift @purgeables, $file;
    }
    else {
        # We have found a non-plaintext part. Add a reference to it in the
        # new body:
        print "\n\n** Attachment decoded and saved to \n** $file\n\n";
    }
}

# Make the list we built the new list of purgeable files:
$parser->filer->purgeable(address@hidden);
# Delete them:
$parser->filer->purge;

umask $oldumask;

 

Set up the mail alias which receives bug reports to pipe messages through
this script before it is piped into queue-pr. Like this (you should modify
the path to queue-pr to fit your installation): 

| /path-to-script/script.pl | /usr/local/libexec/gnats/queue-pr -q
Warning: Using this filter causes PRs to be stored in the Gnats database in
a decoded format which might not be supported properly by all UNIXes.
Outgoing mail from GNATS will also be unencoded, possibly resulting in
problems when mail is transferred over the Internet. Some mail clients may
also have problems with it. In short: your mileage may vary.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
GNATS > DECODING MIME E-MAIL 

 
First published: Wednesday, 09-May-2001 23:38:00 MET DST
Last modified: Wednesday, 09-May-2001 23:38:00 MET DST
address@hidden


 

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf
Of Adam Cade
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 3:00 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Gnats email can't handle attachments?

Hi guys!

Need your need!

GnatsWeb seems to be coding the e-mail attachments wrong. Any binary format
seems to come out like:

>How-To-Repeat:
  >Fix:
  Unknown
  >Unformatted:
   ----gnatsweb-attachment----
   Content-Type: image/pjpeg; name="AmendJobError.jpg"
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
   Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="AmendJobError.jpg"
   
 
/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD//gAcU29mdHdhcmU6IE1pY3Jvc29mdCBPZmZpY2X/2wBDAAoH
 
BwgHBgoICAgLCgoLDhgQDg0NDh0VFhEYIx8lJCIfIiEmKzcvJik0KSEiMEExNDk7Pj4+JS5ESUM8
 
SDc9Pjv/2wBDAQoLCw4NDhwQEBw7KCIoOzs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7
 
Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozs7Ozv/wAARCAMABAADASIAAhEBAxEB/8QAHAABAAIDAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAA
 
AAQFAgMGBwEI/8QAXBAAAQMCAgQKBAgMAwcCBAQHAQACAwQRBRIGEyExFBUWIkFRVZTR0lRhldMy
 
NlNxgZKToRcjM0JSc3SRo7Kz8Ac0ViRDYnKDscFFwjV14fElJkRjZKKCljfD4v/EABoBAQEBAQEB
 
AQAAAAAAAAAAAAACAQMEBQb/xAA4EQACAQIDBAgGAgEFAQEBAAAAAQIDERITUSExkbEEQVJhgaHR
 
4RQVMnHB8AUiNCMzQmLxgiRy/90ABAAo/9oADAMBAAIRAxEAPwDl9B4KWbH81fhcuI0ccR1scbA4
 
gnY3eRtLrAAG5OwXXozNHtHMawevFFo3BT1URytjM2WQAncdhyPsD0EA7L3DgOA0QfV4jWUuE0bK
  
etc etc....

Any one have any help?

Thanks,


--
Adam Cade , Go Internet Ltd
email: address@hidden
voice: +44 (0)20 7419 0001
fax  : +44 (0)20 7419 6519
web  : www.gointernet.co.uk




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