Newsletter displayed "raw" with some recipients

[martin.huber@canoo.com]

Hi,

until now we have sent 2 newsletters using the sugarcrm campaign module, and both times there were recipients, who couldn't really read the newsletter as they have received it in a raw format, showing all original mail headers and content boundaries, ... in the mail body.

Has anyone else experienced similar problems?

We are using postfix as smtp server.

The mail servers of the recipients with the unreadable mails have exchange or horde - so it doesn't seem that it's only one incoming mail server type.

I am under the impression that sugarcrm is using "phpmailer" as the mail sending component, is that right?
Is phpmailer known to have such problems?

Thanks for any help!
Cheers,
Martin

[martin.huber@canoo.com]

Ok, in the meanwhile I found out by myself what the problem was.
Maybe it is of interest for anyone who will come into the same situation at some time.

I created a test campaign with a test target list that has sent the mail to a unix mailbox where I could see the raw mail format and the mail headers without many hops and interfering systems.

In the received mail I noticed a couple of header lines ending with a LF (\n) and others ending with CRLF (\r\n).
I recognized, that the LF-headers where added by our smtp-Server and the CRLF-headers by phpmailer.
I also recognized that the header line following the first header with CRLF was the first line in the body of the unreadable emails.

I checked the RFC, the postfix documentation and the source of phpmailer and came down to an error with phpmailer, when sending mail using php mail:
the RFC says, that every header line should be terminated with CRLF when communicating SMTP !
But when php mail is the transport, obviously the mail is not sent over SMTP, but streamed to a local program - in our case a linux program. In that case header lines must be terminated with OS standard line endings, what is not honored by phpmailer.

But why phpmailer had been using php mail and not SMTP?

A colleague of mine who did the SugarCRM mail configuration made a mistake and was using a non-existing dns alias for the smtp server definition.
Such the mail test and the mailings nevertheless succeed, because obviously phpmailer seems to be falling back to php mail if smtp server definition is false. And the local unix mail system has been configured in a way that php mail could send out the mails - but unfortunatly with the wrong CRLF header line endings what only had an effect in some receiving mail servers.

So it was the bad luck to combine the 2 errors:
- providing a non working smtp server (I also tested it with foo.bar.com)
- a bug in phpmailer on unix based systems when sending mails using php mail.

Cheers,
Martin

[gauts]

you should try to downgrade phpmailer class (include/phpmailer) using an old version included in an old version of sugarcrm.

phpmailer version 2.3 doesn't seem to ben working properly with sugar.

i'm using sugerCE 6.1.4 with phpmailer 1.7 and it works now