[Esd-l] ERR: mimencode failed

John D. Hardin jhardin at impsec.org
Fri Jul 30 21:21:24 PDT 2004


On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Mike McCandless wrote:

> I get the message "ERR: mimeencode failed" in the procmail log when
> receiving MS-Office attachments, although the attachments get there fine.
> What is the cause?  A recent example from procmail log is:
> 
> Sanitizing MIME & attachments in "Excel Attachment" from
> <michael at prismbiz.com> to <michael at prismbiz.com>
> msgid=<002601c476aa$12977450$6701a8c0 at RTP8355>
>  Checking Office document "Expense Report Template.xls" for stripping.
>  Checking Office document "Expense Report Template.xls" for stripping.
>  ERR: mimencode failed:

The message means mimencode errored out when asked to decode the
base64 attachment body.

You might be able to get more info if you strip just the base64
attachment out of a message and run the command line that is like what
the sanitizer is running:

	cat /tmp/base64encodedfile | mimencode -u -o /tmp/decoded

The sanitizer isn't capturing any error output from mimencode (the
trailing ":" in the log should be followed by something) - running it
interactively may shed some light.

If you can't figure it out, try using the CPAN support instead.

--
 John Hardin KA7OHZ    ICQ#15735746    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
 jhardin at impsec.org    FALaholic #11174    pgpk -a jhardin at impsec.org
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