Corrupted links in emails

SIVC
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Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Thu May 14, 2020 11:15 am

Hi,
I purchased Dada Mail Pro (lifetime) on 16th April on behalf a social club I'm involved in.
Although installation went smoothly, soon after going live with our members there was an issue with a corrupted link to a Zoom meeting in one of our emails. We are only using Dada Mail in Bridge / discussion group mode.
I sent emails to support@dadamail.zendesk.com (as the documentation suggested) on 28th & 29th April but received no reply of any sort.

Since then we have encountered another corrupted link in an email (although not in quite same way - not sure if related mechanism).

This is rather disappointing as although we are only a club of 55 members (although celebrating 40 years in October) we put our faith in Dada Mail and paid for the lifetime licence so would have access to support.

Please could you advise if this is correct place to post requests for support or if not, where?

I will supply more details of the issues when I know I'm using the right channel.
Thanks,
Richard

SIVC
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Mon Sep 07, 2020 4:02 pm

Upgraded to last version, 11_11_2 but still see an issue whereby emails sent via Bridge (the only mode I use) can be corrupted by loosing "dots".
This can happen to url links and I have also seen html formatting affected creating bizarre formatting e.g. <span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#0A0A0A'> becomes <span style='font-size:120pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#0A0A0A'> which of course cause some text to appear 10 x too large!

I have Dada Mail Pro installed on an Ionos shared hosting package.
Am I the only user to see this problem? Any suggestions on how to fix?
Thanks.

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dadamail
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Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by dadamail » Tue Sep 08, 2020 5:13 am

(I have yet to recreate the problem)
Justin J
Creator, Dada Mail

SIVC
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Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Wed Sep 09, 2020 7:25 pm

I've found if a normal email from other users causes an issue I can generally turn it into a test case by getting the body source code of the original email body, and then re-sending it in a manner that makes absolutely no changes to the source code (using a normal email client like Outlook is no good as it does modify the formatting html code). To this end I've created a simple web page written in html/php that can pick up the body source code from a file and use the basic PHP "mail" command to send it as an email. I've successfully created repeatable test cases for both the corrupted link & corrupted formatting issues I've seen (but I think they are essentially the same problem anyway).
Recently (while knowing nothing about the nitty-gritty of how Dada Mail works) thinking that the issue is somehow related to the absolute position of the "dots" that disappear, I tried adding one extra character, before the bit of the body source that gets corrupted - the test case no longer exhibited the problem. A similar result when I deleted a character from the body source code. My third experiment added a character at one place and deleted one from another different place - this time the problem came back - so looks to me as if a dot occurs at a particular number of characters from start of body source code the corruption (missing dot) may occur. As far as I know other characters are not affected.
I've no idea if there is anything in Dada Mail / the perl modules it calls that could cause this behaviour.
I currently have 2 installations of Dada Mail one the free basic version at version 11_10_1 and a Pro version at version 11.11.2 hosted in different shared server packages (but both with Ionos) and find my testcase behaviour is same in both. I've never seen the emails stored in list Archive show the corruption, only the versions mailed to subscribers.
If there is any more info I may have that could help, please ask.

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dadamail
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Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by dadamail » Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:23 pm

If there's a simple test case I can look at, I'll give it another look. If you can let me know what you have set in,
Sending: Advanced Options that can also help. I'll say right now, if the message encodings aren't both quoted/printable, change it to that, then see if your problems are still there.
Justin J
Creator, Dada Mail

SIVC
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:25 pm

I've uploaded a few files which I hope will help. I've anonymised my testcase so it's safe to share.

Sending_Advanced_Options_Pro_Dada.jpg - this the Sending: Advanced Options as screenshot. (both are quoted-printable)

corrupt_font_anon_orig_trim.txt - this is a file for email body text which (for me anyway) demonstrates the problem in email sent to subscribers the problem (a missing dot causes some text to be 10 times too large)

corrupt_font_anon_orig_trim_plus1char.txt - This version is simply modified by adding "P" to the end of subject, and now the problem disappears.

dada email anon.jpg - this view of received email using corrupt_font_anon_orig_trim.txt as body text showing incorrect formatting.

dada email anon p1c.jpg - this view of received email using corrupt_font_anon_orig_trim_plus1char.txt as body text showing expected formatting.

Note these testcases need Mass mailing->Options->Default Mass Mailing Layout to be set to "For Discussion List Messages" - different testcases can be captured for different Mass Mailing Layouts, but it seems a given testcase will only show the problem if used with same layout as when it was captured.

I tried to add txt files but didn't seem to work - I'll try a new post
Attachments
Sending_Advanced_Options_Pro_Dada.jpg
Sending_Advanced_Options_Pro_Dada.jpg (92.93 KiB) Viewed 49065 times
dada email anon.jpg
dada email anon.jpg (49.33 KiB) Viewed 49065 times
dada email anon p1c.jpg
dada email anon p1c.jpg (31.27 KiB) Viewed 49065 times

SIVC
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:26 pm

trying 7z tar of txt files (see my previous post)
Attachments
testcase _text_files_to_dada.7z
(1.28 KiB) Downloaded 1395 times

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dadamail
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Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by dadamail » Fri Sep 11, 2020 6:08 pm

Sorry to be so picky, but it helps greatly with trying to debug the problem: is there a way to recreate the problem when no layout used (ie: selecting, "don't use a layout". These layouts (the html) do change, and those changes could affect the emails generated. I'm already having trouble simply recreating the issue, so the simplest, most universal test case is the best.
Justin J
Creator, Dada Mail

SIVC
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Mon Sep 14, 2020 8:48 am

I fully understand your request and I'll see if I can come up with something, but upto now all my testcases have been generated from real emails i.e. ones sent by subscribers to the discussion groups I've set up being used for their designed purpose, and all have either used the dadamail supplied discussion group template or a customised version of it.
To generate the testcases I've just spotted corruption in the delivered emails and maybe trimmed content after the point of corruption and anonymised names etc by substituting X & Ys, being careful to keep number charcters exactly the same.
I haven't fully scoped it out yet, but knowing the problem I see is due to dots dissappearing, I'll try to generate a test email with lots of font size formatting and variable lengths of text in between in hope that increases probability of showing the issue.
However I'm busy for next weekir so - it may be a while before I can do this.

SIVC
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu May 14, 2020 11:06 am

Re: Corrupted links in emails

Post by SIVC » Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:39 pm

I've now created and my my experiment with matrix of synthesised testcase emails to cover "dots" in every possible position in email body.

Initial conclusions:

A: With a few exceptions, the error occurs when a dot falls on a matrix of positions with 71 character spacing.

B: If I select sending->options "SMTP" instead of the default "sendmail" method, this issue disappears (although gives me a new problem).

Regarding A:, I suspect either Dadamail or sendmail are doing some manipulation intended to meet some need such as PHP mail() function requirement that "Each line should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n). Lines should not be larger than 70 characters."

To be honest I don't know much about sendmail - I believe its a built-in Linux command? Could it be capable of causing the issue Ive seen?
When first installing Dadamail I generally just used the defaults as I didn't know any better so went with sendmail.

I have discovered that although not officially documented, these days PHP mail() is more robust and can tolerate longer lines - certainly I was using it to submit my synthesised testcase emails which had line over 8,000 characters. Tring to submit email with a line more than around 10,000 the email failed to send and I got error from Ionos "SMTP error from remote server for TEXT command, host: mx00.1and1.co.uk (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) reason: 501 Syntax error - line too long"

Regarding B:, my new problem is while my testcase emails send to a small mailing list (3 subscribers) worked, when I applied same setting to a slightly larger mailing list (10 subscribers) no emails were actually received, although the log indicated they had been sent.

I attach a .7z file containing 3 files:-

synthesised_testcase_33.html [Using this as message content source to send through a dadamail discussion group with no template, using sendmail, the delivered emails had 4 errors.]

synthesised_testcase_33_passed_thro_dadamail.html [This is the received email content - the 4 errors (missing dots) cause following text to be 10x larger.]

dada testcase batch results.xlsx [this is spreadsheet I used to analyse the results of the 42 emails I used in my test]
Attachments
testcase _files_to_dada_1oct20.7z
(15.11 KiB) Downloaded 1393 times

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