Bug#240256: Consistent error in sending SMTP mail in 8-bit mode
Package: kmail
Version: 4:3.2.1-1
Dear Riku,
Martin Tsachev sent a rather terse error message. Allow me to
elaborate, for I have seen this problem rather consistently after
upgrading KMail and on a new KMail installation.
The situation seems to occur when SMTP is the outward protocol AND
"Allow 8-bit" is selected. I have tried this on two completely
separate systems (having completely separate SMTP servers); one
system allows TLS-encrypted SMTP, the other does not. In both
cases, sending a mail with "Allow 8-bit" generates the following
dialog box message:
Sending failed:
Unknown error code 50
Your server does not support sending of 8-bit messages.
Please use base64 or quoted-printable encoding.
Please send a full bug report at http://bugs.kde.org.
The message will stay in the 'outbox' folder until you either
fix the problem (e.g. a broken address) or remove the message
from the 'outbox' folder.
A few comments:
1. I am in charge of the SMTP server, with full access to the logs.
I can confirm Martin's observation that KMail does not even try
to contact the SMTP server.
2. I have selected "us-ascii" and "utf-8" as my charsets (Settings
>> Configure KMail dialog box, Composer icon, Charset tab), in
that order.
3. Once the message is in the outbox, go to the Settings >>
Configure KMail dialog box, Network icon, Sending tab. Change
Message Property to "MIME Compliant (Quoted Printable)", then try
resending the message. The message will NOT be changed to Quoted
Printable, but WILL be sent successfully!
4. Compose a new message (eg, to yourself) with Quoted Printable
still enabled, but do NOT send it---queue it. Change the Message
Property back to 8-bit. View the source to the message in the
outbox; it should still read "Content-Transfer-Encoding:
quoted-printable" (you may need to include some internation
characters, eg, Cyrillic or French). Now, try sending: it will
fail.
5. I have tried this on two separate systems, one which had an
upgrade to KMail, the other which had a fresh KMail config file.
The same problem occurred on both systems.
I am happy to supply additional information, or to try other
suggestions you might have. I suspect that this bug needs to be
reported upstream; I think it was a regression introduced in KMail
3.2.1 as I used previous versions quite happily. Using 8-bit UTF-8
mail is important to me; there are many applications in which using
quoted-printable mail is not an option.
I will try to have a quick look at the source code to KMail to see
if I can narrow the problem down a little.
Yours truly,
John Zaitseff
--
John Zaitseff ,--_|\ The ZAP Group
Phone: +61 2 9643 7737 / \ Sydney, Australia
E-mail: J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au \_,--._* http://www.zap.org.au/
Finger: john@zap.org.au v
GnuPG fingerprint: 8FD2 8962 7768 2546 FE07 DE7C 61A8 4486 C9A6 69B0
Reply to: