Manca Weeks's questions

I have run into a attachment display issue at a client who has recently switched from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. The issue was initially perceived as affecting only Mac OS X email clients (Outlook 2011 and Mac OS Mail) and iOS clients.

After some troubleshooting I discovered that GoDaddy webmail also suffers from the same issue.The attachment displays as binary code instead of an attachment.

The attachments in question are sent from a SAP server as .xls files containing basic html code. The attachments are decoded correctly on Windows clients, although they produce an error about the contents of the attachment not matching the extension, which had to be overridden for the attachments to come through at all. Initially, the issue was that the new Exchange 2010 server was stripping the attachment contents for security reasons because of this error.

The attachments are uuencoded in the following format:

begin 664 Filename.xls

[binary code]

end

I simply want to know what the reason is for these being incorrectly decoded on clients and webmail interfaces of a recent vintage... Is it simply because the encoding is so ancient that most platforms have abandoned support for it or is it possible that there is another problem?

I am trying to assist the sender in fixing this problem as they are at a loss and they send a ton of these automated mailings to their customers every day.

My recommendation to them was going to be to encode the attachments in accordance with the current MIME standards and point them to the spec https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2045

Anyone more expert on this willing to school me on whether I am missing something here, please let me know if I am going in the wrong direction.

Thanks,

M

---posted in response to request for message headers - didn't fit into comment---

Received: (qmail 26660 invoked from network); 5 May 2012 09:30:51 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO m1pismtp01-024.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net) ([10.8.12.27])
      (envelope-sender <[removed]>)
      by p3plsmtp05-04.prod.phx3.secureserver.net (qmail-1.03) with SMTP
      for <[removed]>; 5 May 2012 09:30:51 -0000
X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AuACAB/wpE+qq/xekWdsb2JhbABFoSgBjhqDMSIBAQEBCQsLGwMkgi2BLzA/iCC6Top/hT1jBI04WZs0
Received: from rhmailer.rhbss.com ([170.171.252.94])
by m1pismtp01-024.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net with ESMTP; 05 May 2012 02:30:50 -0700
Received: from sapapp2.us.[removed].com (10.104.61.31) by RHMAILER.RHBSS.COM id hkjpke18hq4j for <[removed]>; Sat, 5 May 2012 05:30:45 -0400 (envelope-from <[removed]>)
Received: from sapapp2.us.[removed].com (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
by sapapp2.us.[removed].com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id q459Umhs003627;
Sat, 5 May 2012 05:30:48 -0400
Received: (from prdadm@localhost)
by sapapp2.us.[removed].com (8.13.8/8.13.8/Submit) id q459UiC0003584;
Sat, 5 May 2012 05:30:44 -0400
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 05:30:44 -0400
Message-Id: <[email protected].[removed].com>
To: [removed addresses]
From: "SAPPRD" <[removed]>
Subject: [removed]
X-Nonspam: None

Yesterday's Top 20 Orders
begin 664 [removed].xls
M/$A434P^"CQ(14%$/@H\;65T82!H='1P+65Q=6EV/2)#;VYT96YT+51Y<&4B
M(&-O;G1E;G0](G1E>'0O:'1M;#L@8VAA<G-E=#UW:6YD;W=S+3$R-3(B/@H\
  [removed confidential content]
M/2)!<FEA;"(^24X\+T9/3E0^/"]41#X*/"]44CX*/"]486)L93X*/"]"3T19
*/@H\+TA434P^"@``
`
end

Reading the Microsoft tech notes on Exchange 2010 configuration, I learned that it is not recommended to have the same server act as an AD domain controller and Exchange 2010 server at once. I have a Windows 2008 Server with Exchange on it and was hoping to do exactly that so the old Windows 2003 servers could be retired and all Windows services consolidated on a single server. Partly because we are limited in the amount of power in the server room and more equipment is being added soon.

Please give me your opinions on this. The server is handling about 50 users, so at least the load on it is not extreme. I am aware that it is not possible to change the AD role without reinstalling the whole thing. Given the configuration quirks the 2008 and Exchange 2010 server suffers from years of upgrading servers without cleaning up, it will likely be a good thing to configure the whole thing from scratch.

Of course the entire thing cannot take more than 24 hours, that's a bonus challenge. I do have other PCs available so I could set up a temporary server installation to take over for the main server as that one is being configured.

I appreciate your opinions,

Thanks

M

A request has been made by a web developer for our domain DNS records to include SPF TXT records. I found differing opinions on this out there...

Any comments or insights you can offer will be highly appreciated. I know this is not an empirical question per se - but I would appreciate your subjective offerings nevertheless... Especially if they were to come with references I could look into such as web posts or online documents, etc.

I have inherited an environment where many things don't make sense and I am now in charge of making changes to it and for this I have to understand what the hell is going on before I modify.

Long story short - there is an email server on the LAN and a firewall on the WAN. The WAN IP of the firewall ends in .89. The A record for the email server ends in .90. (The IP pool we have is .89-.93 although only 1 address, .89, is actually plugged in - there is only one line that terminates in the server closet from the ISP).

I am trying to figure out how this is possible. By logic I can conjure, unless the ISP is doing something to redirect traffic from the .90 address (which is not physically plugged in) to the .89 address, nothing addressed to .90 should arrive at .89 - but it does.

I was told by the ISP that they were not doing anything of this kind, but I have run out of other ideas... I only need to know because the IP pool is getting changed (the ISP is switching to a different address pool) and I need to know about all the configuration points to make sure that once the IP change happens, there will be no stale configurations in place and email will flow to the new address correctly after the DNS modification propagates.

Please let me know if there are any other scenarios you can think of that could be happening here. I don't think the firewall could be doing the redirecting when its WAN IP is .89 and therefore shouldn't see any traffic directed to .90, should it?

Thanks in advance,

M

I have a sad network left behind by some careless administrators - I am in the process of figuring out exactly what services are running where, not excluding the possibility that some services are running from two places at once, which is tons of fun.

There are two Windows Server 2003 servers, one Windows Server 2008 server with Exchange 2010 on it and a SonicWall TZ210 between the LAN and the WAN. Computers connected via DHCP reveal the gateway IP address that corresponds to the SonicWall unit, however it doesn't have DHCP enabled.

Where and how might I discover what is running DHCP so I could administer it? I am also concerned about internal DNS and Windows domain services as there appears to be confusing information on the network that conflicts with itself.

I am trying to estimate whether it is realistic for me to change the IP of a mail server overnight or will this mess with people retrieving their email the day after. Basically, the facility where the mail server is will be changing its IP pool and this forces me to have to change the A and MX record for the mail server. Since I am not changing the DNS server itself (not moving the records to a different authoritative server), will the change be near instantaneous or will it still take up to 48 hours because of caching on different non authoritative DNS servers that may have queried recently?

Thanks for any insight,

M