Strange problem with file attachments

Hello all,

This is a weird problem. I send an email to the RT system with a
Microsoft Excel .xls file attached. Then when I click on the attachment
in RT to download/open it, the file looks like garbage. BUT then I took
the same file, renamed it slightly (adding a ‘1’) and resent it to RT in
an email. This time it looked fine inside the RT system. When I try to
reproduce the problem, sometimes renaming the file works, and other
times not.

We have sent several Microsoft Word (.doc) and Excel (.xls) files to the
RT system with no problems prior to this. Any idea what is causing the
inconsistency?

Our set up is as follows: RT 3.0.10 running on Gentoo Linux system with
Linux kernel 2.4.25. Also using mod-perl 2, apache 2 and mysql on the
backend. Thanks in advance for any help.

Here are the dependencies:

perl:
5.8.0…found
MASON dependencies:
Params::Validate 0.02…found
Cache::Cache …found
Exception::Class …found
HTML::Mason 1.16…found
MLDBM …found
Errno …found
FreezeThaw …found
Digest::MD5 2.27…found
CGI::Cookie 1.20…found
Storable 2.08…found
Apache::Session 1.53…found
MAILGATE dependencies:
HTML::TreeBuilder …found
HTML::FormatText …found
Getopt::Long …found
LWP::UserAgent …found
CLI dependencies:
Getopt::Long 2.24…found
CORE dependencies:
Digest::MD5 2.27…found
DBI 1.37…found
Test::Inline …found
Class::ReturnValue 0.40…found
DBIx::SearchBuilder 0.97…found
Text::Template …found
File::Spec 0.8…found
HTML::Entities …found
Net::Domain …found
Log::Dispatch 2.0…found
Locale::Maketext 1.06…found
Locale::Maketext::Lexicon 0.32…found
Locale::Maketext::Fuzzy …found
MIME::Entity 5.108…found
Mail::Mailer 1.57…found
Net::SMTP …found
Text::Wrapper …found
Time::ParseDate …found
File::Temp …found
Term::ReadKey …found
Text::Autoformat …found
Text::Quoted 1.3…found
Scalar::Util …found
DEV dependencies:
Regexp::Common …found
Time::HiRes …found
Test::Inline …found
WWW::Mechanize …found
MYSQL dependencies:
DBD::mysql 2.1018…found
MODPERL2 dependencies:
CGI 2.92…found
Apache::DBI …found

This is a weird problem. I send an email to the RT system with a
Microsoft Excel .xls file attached. Then when I click on the attachment
in RT to download/open it, the file looks like garbage.
[snip happens]
perl:
5.8.0…found

This version of Perl is known to cause file corruptions. It is
recommended to use 5.8.4 or newer with RT.

Michael
Michael S. Liebman m-liebman@northwestern.edu
http://msl521.freeshell.org/
“I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”
-Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid”