Outlook fails with CRLFs from PHP+qmail

Anon

Hi,

We have an email configuration with PHP4 and qmail. All mail clients with the exception of Outlook (2000, Express) receive linefeeds (CRLF) and attachments properly when sending from PHP code.

However, when receiving the email, Outlook seems to remove all the CRLFs (\r\n) from the message header and body, replacing each with a space. After that the message is nothing but a mess.

Other mail clients handle CRLFs properly and have no problems whatsoever.

Does anyone know what might have caused this? Should we look into PHP (4.1.2), Apache, qmail?

Any help is highly appreciated.

Anon

OK, I reply to this myself in case someone else has faced the same problem.

The problem was because of qmail that did NOT like CRLF's as linefeeds when sending mail. The linefeed must be a bare LF. If a CRLF was given, qmail put an additional CR in front of the LF thus making the linefeed look like CRCRLF. MS Outlook (and many other non-unix mail clients) did not like that at all and replaced all CRCRLFs with spaces. After that, the mess was obvious.

qmail and sendmail are NOT compatible since sendmail also accepts CRLFs as linefeeds, not placing an additional CR if an existing one is already there.

This is tedious since many emails (like MS Outlook) send linefeeds as CRLFs. So outgoing linefeeds are LFs and incoming CRLFs. The PHP script handling mails must thus prepare for both styles, if qmail is the MTA.