Error - Gibberish Subjects

Problem reported by Jaime - 12/31/2020 at 10:46 AM

Resolved

Some emails subjects are transformed into this:

Example 1:

=?UTF-8?B?UmU6IFNvcG9ydGUgfCBEYXJtZSBzdGF0dXMgZGUgY3XDoW50YXMgdmlzaXRhcyBmYWx0YW4gZGUgcmVhbGl6YXIgeSBjdcOhbnQ=YXMgZmFsdGFuIGRlIGZhY3R1cmFy?=

Example 2:

=?UTF-8?B?wqFGZWxpeiBBw7FvIE51ZXZvISBUZSBkZXM=ZWEgVG95b3RhIElubm92YcKgwqDwn5iJ8J+al8Kg8J+YgA==?=

It does not happen always, we havent found a specific pattern, but its happening many times.

42 Replies

Reply to Thread

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/2/2021 at 11:42 AM

Hello,

This is an issue known by the ST team that we've reported early october 2020 and some fixes were attempted. As of today it is an issue and the last word from support on our ticket about it was (28 december):

"Good afternoon, and thanks for your patience on this. I was able to get this replicated under our latest release using the instructions you sent over. I'll get this over to development right away. Thanks again for your efforts on this Sebastien. I'll make sure this gets some attention sooner rather than later. Have a great day! "

There is probably good hopes that it will be fixed in the next release or a maybe a custom build.

Kind regards.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Jaime Replied

1/2/2021 at 12:46 PM

Thanks Sebastien! I hope it gets solved soon.

Ron Raley Replied

1/3/2021 at 10:18 AM

Sebastian, what causes this?

Ron

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/3/2021 at 11:05 AM

Ron,

According to my tests, when writing/replying to messages from the webmail, the headers, when they contain special chars/accents are re-encoded as per RFC 2047, but they are wrongly re-encoded so it corrupts them.

It seems it affects at least the "Subject" header and the "To" header (that is used to generate the webmail recipient autocomplete list that is also corrupted).

I did some tests checking the headers of received mail and replied mails using

https://dogmamix.com/MimeHeadersDecoder/ and it showed the symptoms.

For the customers the symptoms is that when they reply to mails from the webmail, their recipients will receive a reply with garbage subject. Also at each subsequent reply the subject gets a bit more "corrupted".

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/4/2021 at 1:52 PM

HI,

We have an open ticket since 12/3/2020 with the same problem.

We are waiting for a solution.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/4/2021 at 10:00 PM

After some exchange with the support team, I was informed that they raised the priority for this issue. I have good hopes that a fix for it will be released soon.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Thomas Lange Replied

1/6/2021 at 9:30 AM

here an actual example:

(running SmarterMail Build 7669 - Inbox of my account in eMClient 8.1.979/EWS-protocol)

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/6/2021 at 9:56 AM

Still waiting for a definitive fix for this. No news from ST. We're losing customers again due to SM bugs...

Last 16.x was working really great except some minor bugs we needed a fix for. We were forced to update to 17.x/100/whatever and since then every few updates that fix something breaks another. As it was at the begining of 16.x.

Things are repeating every major version, nothing is learned from past experience.

This time we are really considering switching another mail solution ASAP :/

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/6/2021 at 11:44 AM

You are absolutely right, Sébastien.
It is very difficult to maintain smartermail for our customers, they fix one problem and create another worse problem, it is not possible to trust updates.

Jaime Replied

1/6/2021 at 12:27 PM

I agree with you both Alessandro and Sebastien, clients are complaining about this and no news from ST. Frustrating.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/6/2021 at 1:04 PM

This is both comforting and worrying. Comforting because I see we are not alone having these issues but worrying because we feel it will never change. That's more than two years that we don't have a stable product.

There is always something to fix that is fixed in an update but then new updates brings other issues.

Also for a quite long period bug fixing was put on hold because of the upcoming MAPI release (a feature that we don't use) as some of the bug fixes were not backported to the non-MAPI production release.

Then the MAPI production ready release was not really production ready and full of issue (more like the real BETA started on the release). Yes it included the long waited fixes but brought a lot of other new issues even we didn't use the new MAPI feature.

Well, most of my colleagues already lost faith in the product and would like that we switch to something else. I can't blame them for this.

This is very frustrating because there is a lot of cool things and great ideas in SmarterMail that these recurring problem are ruining.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/8/2021 at 12:37 PM

Hello SmaterTools,

Any news on this. It's friday and it is soon to be the weekend. We can't handle anymore our customer support tickets we have about this issue (a lot are very angry) and we have no news from your team about it.

Can we expect a fix for this before the weekend ?

Thanks for the feedback.

Regards

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Heimir Eidskrem Replied

1/8/2021 at 3:08 PM

We are also seeing this. Getting customer complaints.

I got two email today.

This is the subject of one from SiruisXM

=?utf-8?B?8J+UtSBORVcgTk9USUZJQ0FUSU9OLiBKYW4sIFdlJ3ZlIEVuYw==bG9zZWQgWW91ciBOZXh0IOKRpiBEYXlzIG9mIExpc3RlbmluZw==?=

This one from Walgreens.

=?UTF-8?B?SmFuLCBpdCdzIHRpbWUgdG8gcmVmaWxsIHlvdXIgcHJlc2NyaXA=dGlvbiBbSUQtMTAwMDA5MTE5NzE3MDA5XQ==?=

Ron Raley Replied

1/8/2021 at 10:52 PM

Not even a custom build link?

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/8/2021 at 11:10 PM

Nothing. We're left on our own with this issue we can't fix and angry customers.

I check every hour, hopeless, if something appears, at least a hotfix for this very problematic issue. Nada...

We are seriously considering going to an open sourced product (commercial or free, but open sourced) so we can at least review/fix the code ourselves if we're in a hurry with catastrophic issues.

Actually we already have something setup and are adding new customers to it. What we are considering now is migrating customers from SM to it if these constant issues continue in the future :(

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/9/2021 at 7:13 AM

Hi Sébastien,

What email system are you testing?

This is difficult to deal with angry customers, we are also looking for alternatives.

Regards,

Michael Replied

1/10/2021 at 1:36 PM

When sending to GMAIL using Build 7669 on a Smarter Mail MAPI account we're seeing Gmail change the Message ID to something like... <xxxxxxxSMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com>

I'm reading this has to do with the fact the Message ID does not obey RFC standard.

Related to what we're seeing above with this subject line issue?

Only on MAPI do we see this.

EAS and IMAP accounts work fine to Gmail.

So it would point to RFC issues with the MAPI accounts only.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/10/2021 at 2:08 PM

Michael, this looks like a different issue. If i'm not wrong Message-ID (if not already exists in the headers) is generated by the mail server, for example when you send a mail from webmail/smtp/eas/mapi.

According to what you're saying here, it looks like the Message-ID generated, when the mail is sent through MAPI, is broken. So there might be something they n eed to fix at this level.

It would be interesting that you send yourself a mail from IMAP/SMTP and another from MAPI and compare the Message-ID in the raw source of the received mails to check if they comply with RFCs.

You should open a new thread or a support request for this particular issue.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Michael Replied

1/10/2021 at 7:37 PM

I've opened a support ticket for my issue of having RFC Message-ID issue when sending from a MAPI account to Gmail.

Andrew Barker Replied

1/11/2021 at 7:37 AM

Employee Post

We are currently working on this issue and expect to have a fix in the next release.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/11/2021 at 12:52 PM

Hello Andrew, that is good news, but do you have an ETA for the next release?

We were kinda hoping for one last friday, before the weekend as this is a big issue.

Any custom build available with this fix, our customers and support dept are on fire here about this.

Kind regards.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Jaime Replied

1/11/2021 at 2:54 PM

We need a fix asap!

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

1/12/2021 at 12:29 AM

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/12/2021 at 4:43 AM

+1
We have an open ticket about this problem for over a month.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/12/2021 at 5:07 AM

We started to see issues with subjects encofing since september 2020 and opened a ticket.

It was supposed to be fixed in a previous 7661 release but the issue is now even worse...

I guess it was fixed the wrong way. Instead of correcting the subject encoding they seems to have fixed the decoding so it displays correctly in the SM webmail (but not for the mail recipients)

Fixed: Scenario in which email subject line could show raw base64 or quoted-printable encoding text in web interface.

...

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/13/2021 at 4:43 AM

Still no news for this major product usability issue. This is getting ridiculous and we're losing a huge amount of trust from our customers!

I try not to be rude but everybody here (customers, support team, admins and I) are tired of constant issues with SM and want this nightmare to end.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Ron Raley Replied

1/13/2021 at 9:13 AM

I don't understand how things can be working so great, then all of a sudden the product falls back into an abyss of issues. Seems like endless and repetitive tidal waves over the years.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/14/2021 at 3:15 AM

Could be:

- Most of it maybe because a lack of QA testing before releasing (Probably not defining/using unit testing?)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/testing/

- Bad design decisions (for example studently translating IMAP special folders)

- For international stuff issues like this one, could be that no testing is done also with international content (probably they have much more english only customer base)

- Introducing new features/changes (that bring issues) in same releases that fix previous issue that are waiting for a fix (let's see what will be bundled with the release fixing this issue)

- For important fixes that would need a quick hotfix to be released, the release is sometimes delayed because they probably wants to finish other changes that will come in the release. (Why not releasing quickly a hotfix that only address the concerned important issues?)

- No "bugtracker" for information about planned changes/new features/fixes being working on while they're being implemented for brief explanation of how it is planned to be implemented.

I think this is a mix of all that kind of stuff leads to a product where stable releases are rare and make you feel that you are always in a beta testing.

There is actually no version that could be considered stable, they all contains fixes that are needed but also have new issues that will need you to update. It would really be great to stop adding new features or changes and focus on fixing remaining bugs. Then freeze this version consider, label it stable and then continue with the other additions/changes.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

JerseyConnect Team Replied

1/14/2021 at 7:49 AM

I agree and wish they would separate out the bug fixes from the feature changes. We've been fighting a bug since November and have been advised to upgrade a few times. Now we're on the latest build and dealing with multiple bugs.

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/14/2021 at 11:17 AM

Where is the SmarterTools fix?
We are receiving several complaints from our customers, and also requesting a date to resolve the problem.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/14/2021 at 3:22 PM

+100

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Tim Uzzanti Replied

1/14/2021 at 4:15 PM

Employee Post

This should be resolved in our next release. Previous messages might not appear properly because of the encoding related to those messages but new messages will show properly.

Hope this helps,

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/14/2021 at 4:23 PM

Hello Tim,

This is great if this is finally fixed. Can we expect the release to be available before the weekend ? I am charged to have our customers to be able to work normally with their e-mail by any means before monday.

Thanks.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/14/2021 at 5:26 PM

Support has informed us that we will have an update available tomorrow.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/14/2021 at 5:31 PM

Hello, received the same information. Crossing fingers...

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/15/2021 at 12:10 PM

Update was announced for today morning but I think it's noon now Arizona time. Still no release available to download. Snifff

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Ron Raley Replied

1/15/2021 at 12:57 PM

The new release will be delivered just before SmarterTools goes home for a 3-day weekend. Nice!

When you folks install it tonight, please provide a quick note here indicating all is well.

Customers must stick together and collaborate. Just please don't storm SmarterTools for an insurrection.

Ron

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/15/2021 at 3:54 PM

Hi,

New release installed, according to my initial tests, this issue seems fixed.

Keeping an eye on the detailed Auto-Folder clean, but so far it doesn't seem to do strange things.

Thanks for the fiixes.

Kind regards.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Alessandro Pereira Replied

1/15/2021 at 4:10 PM

Thanks for the return, Sébastien

Regards,
Alessandro

echoDreamz Replied

1/15/2021 at 7:25 PM

I think the auto clean stuff only rights during specific times of day, so will have to watch it for a few days to see how it does. We've not upgraded to it yet, will wait :)

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/15/2021 at 11:49 PM

Well, if I'm not wrong auto clean is also triggered when a change is made to a folder (new mail received, mail moved into a folder, etc)

Having set the folder auto clean log to detailed, we see it is triggered a lot of times but no mail was deleted yet.

If i'm not wrong again, when doing the update, the current auto folder clean rules based on "message date" are converted to "time in the folder"

The "time in a folder" being a new value, it is set to the server update date for existing items, so it will start counting from this date.

I guess because of this nothing will be deleted until a few days, when items reach the trigger with the lowest allowed days.

Not sure I'm explaining it clearly though :)

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Sébastien Riccio Replied

1/16/2021 at 8:13 AM

Well... it was too good to be true. Since the update to the latest build, service runs a few hours and suddently the process cpu usage goes to 100% and the services stop responding.

We had to manually kill the process 3 times since the update. It rarely happened before the update.

EDIT: Opened own thread for the issue
https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a93860/build-7685-unresponsive-and-100-cpu-usage-after-a-few-hours.aspx

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

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