mailx sends text body as an attachment

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
  • mailx

Issue

When sending an e-mail from a command line or a script using mailx, the text intended to be a body is received as an attachment. This is often visible as a .bin attachment in Microsoft Outlook. Sometimes when the same command or script is used on RHEL 5, the e-mail is displayed as expected in the e-mail client (MUA).

Resolution

  • Remove non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters from the e-mail text, or
  • use sendmail, which will accept and forward DOS-style formatted text, or
  • use mutt, which provides more funcionality regarding how the e-mail should be sent.

Root Cause

As a matter of fact, RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 mailx commands are two different packages. While bsd-mailx is included in RHEL 5, mailx in RHEL 6 comes from the heirloom-mailx package, which is a different implementation of mailx and is not 100% compatible with bsd-mailx. mailx in RHEL 5 sometimes sends e-mails that are not compliant to applicable standards (most importantly RFC 2822). Such e-mails might be displayed correctly by coincidence though. mailx in RHEL 6 fixes many such occurrences, which might be observered as an unexpected behavior and paradoxically even leading to e-mails being incorrectly displayed by some e-mail clients (MUAs).

Due to non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters, when mailx processes the input, it correctly sets the MIME type to application/octet-stream when non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters are present. This is an expected behavior. E-mail clients then may display application/octet-stream content as an attachment rather than as an e-mail body. A non-printable character that often appears in text files and causes such issues is a DOS-style line ending \r\n, as opposed to \n used in UN*X-like operating systems.

Diagnostic Steps

As per mailx man page:

  Mailx expects input text to be in Unix format, with lines separated by newline (^J, \n) characters only.  
  Non-Unix text files that use carriage return (^M, \r) characters in addition will be treated as binary data; to send such files as text, strip these characters e. g. by

  tr -d ’\015’ <input | mailx . . .

  or fix the tools that generate them.

Alternatively dos2unix can be used to strip the \r character. Similarly, if any other non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters are present, strip or convert them before passing the text to mailx.

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