Plain text messages above ~16k appear blank

[Ron Parker]

The problem messages are being sent by a process that pipes output to the mail command, using something like "rpm -qa | mail -s 'Subject' <email address hidden>".

After some experimentation, it appears to be related to the length of the message. In this specific case it happens as the command output length approaches 16k. In my test case 617 lines of output had 15756 bytes of text which came through fine, but 618 lines with 15780 bytes of text did not. It does not appear to be content related as I also repeated the results inserting a "sed 's/./x/g'" into the pipe.

In Evolution, if I select View Message Source, I see

    ...
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    ...
    Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
    ...
    Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="=-DeWfHmCGf0C5hf7mdHxq"

    --=-DeWfHmCGf0C5hf7mdHxq
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
    Content-Type: text/plain

    --=-DeWfHmCGf0C5hf7mdHxq--

in the bugged messages. So the multipart/mixed block structure is there, but the content is not. Looking at these messages on my Blackberry, Outlook or OWA shows the expected message content.

I've attached 4 messages that were saved as an mbox. The subjects contain head or xead and the number of lines 617 or 618 that were sent. The 'xead' messages are the one's where the content was replaced by x's.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: evolution 2.32.2-0ubuntu7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-10.46-generic 2.6.38.7
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-10-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Jul 19 12:29:23 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evolution
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
SourcePackage: evolution
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)