Description of problem: I have seen several emails sent from evolution (evolution-2.8.3-1.fc6 on x86_64) where the message is in HTML, but the HTML portion of the received message contains "!\n " (exclamation mark, newline, and space) inserted in random places. It doesn't appear in the text/plain portion of the received message, and the message that got copied to the Sent folder on the sending machine does not include the extra exclamations either! The messages are being given to sendmail (sendmail-8.13.8-2) on the same machine, and the SMTP host is running postfix (postfix-2.2.10-1.RHEL4.2). I've had reports of the same thing with another (non-postfix-hosted) recipient as well. So why are these extra things getting inserted into the message? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): evolution-2.8.3-1.fc6 sendmail-8.13.8-2 How reproducible: Frequently.
I think this is a sendmail "feature". I did test it today, I can reproduce it on sendmail-8.14.1-2 on x86_64 Rawhide, but the information from evolution is "clear" of those characters. Futhermore, I found in sendmail sources sequences where they put exactly these characters on output, it's in sendmail/util.c:putxline function, and something similar, but without that last space, is at sendmail/deliver.c:putbody function. I don't know what does that code do and why, I don't know sendmail either, it only looks for me that evolution didn't do this.
Seems to be when the line length has been reached. Is evolution sending the mail as one long line?
No, it isn't. I think, it's based on composer, how long lines are. (I paste one page from firefox and there was only few lines too long for sendmail (even in text editor there are couple of long lines, but not so much).)
I was looking into this more deeply and it looks like that GtkHtml exports text from component in HTML with "\n" with almost all tags inside it, but only not with Anchors, so with a long URLS it could exceed line limit (about 996 or 998 characters) or when there are more anchors on one line. I wasn't sure if it's safe to make enters right after end of Anchor tag (like "<A ...>\n"), I only know that there was some kind of problem with "\n" inside tables with IE, but could not remember it exactly. My second thought was to place it one character before this end (like "<A ...\n>"), but I remembered a ">From " problem and keep it as is. We need to either get an advice from upstream or somebody who knows HTML better than me, or something completely else.
Milan, did we ever find a resolution for this or at least open a bug upstream?
There is nothing better than I mentioned in comment #4 above. Also, you've right, I didn't move this upstream yet.
I created bug upstream now, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484634
Moving this upstream so we only have to track the problem in one place. See the above link for further updates.