Spectrum AlarmNotifier emails are being received as att00001.bin attachments

Products

• CA Spectrum
• DX NetOps

Issue/Introduction

Spectrum AlarmNotifier emails are being received as att00001.bin attachments

When sending an e-mail from a command line or a script using mailx, the text intended to be a body is received as an attachment. This is often visible as a.bin attachment in Microsoft Outlook. Sometimes when the same command or script is used on RHEL 5, the e-mail is displayed as expected in the e-mail client (MUA).

Environment

Release: Any version of Spectrum installed on Linux
Component:

Cause

The Mail or Mailx client on the Linux OS is reading the content in the SystemEdge trap and creating an “att00001.bin” file from the trap.

Due to non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters, when mailx processes the input, it correctly sets the MIME type to application/octet-stream when non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters are present. This is an expected behavior. E-mail clients then may display application/octet-stream content as an attachment rather than as an e-mail body. A non-printable character that often appears in text files and causes such issues is a DOS-style line ending\r\n, as opposed to \n used in UN*X-like operating systems.

Resolution

• Remove non-US-ASCII or non-printable characters from the e-mail text, or
• Use sendmail, which will accept and forward DOS-style formatted text, or
• Use mutt, which provides more functionality regarding how the e-mail should be sent.

Additional Information

Please see "mailx sends text body as an attachment" for more information.