PDF Corruption When Sending with Microsoft Products

corruptionpdfsmtp

I have the same PDF corruption problem in two different offices that I am the tech support for.

Office 1:
Started in the middle of December. PDF received from outside the office and is viewable with no problems. I have no control over how it is created. If it is forwarded to anyone else, the PDF is corrupted. I have forwarded it to multiple people in the office. I have tried viewing with Reader 8, 9, Sumatra and Fox IT. I have tried forwarding to Gmail and their viewer says it is corrupted. If I save the PDF and create a new email, it will be corrupted when sent using Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Microsoft Live Mail and Outlook Express. If I create the email using Thunderbird 3, Gmail or the webclient Iclient for IPSwitch IMail it will not be corrupted. I have confirmed the same results when using our IMail SMTP and also Using Gmail as the SMTP server.

To be clear, if I created in Thunderbird, Gmail or Iclient and received on any of the MS products, it will be viewable.

This office receives PDFs daily from multiple sources. There is only a small subset that are having this problem. So far they problem PDFs are from two different companies they deal with, but not all of the PDFs are bad.

Office 2:
PDFs are created by a management system. I'm not sure what engine is used to create them. Same exact same issues.

At both offices, I noticed that the file size is wrong. One small PDF the proper file size is 12kb for the PDF when it's viewable, when it shows up corrupted it is only 8kb.

We handle the email for both offices. Both are POP servers, not Exchange. IMail was updated after these issues start. I have tried different SMTP servers and it still seems to happen only when using Microsoft products to send.

Anyone else having problems with PDFs getting corrupted? Any ideas how to find out a resolution?

Best Answer

I have some questions:

Have you opened the PDFs (good and not-good) in a text editor? PDFs are mainly text. Reader renders them to the screen. There can be binary within, but they're primarily ASCII. You might be able to open a good one that went bad and compare each. For instance, are they getting chopped? Are CR/LFs getting converted to LFs?
For Office 2: Are the initially-created PDFs corrupt? Or after they are forwarded?
If you ZIP up the PDFs and send them via MS-based applications, are THEY corrupted as well?
We already know that the sent PDF is corrupt after reception. But what about the attached item in outlook's Sent Items? Is THAT one corrupt?
Is the Outlook option to use UUENCODE for attachments within plain text messages on? (I realize you've tried other applications. I am narrowing this out.)

Just throwing out a few things.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to correct Postfix’ ‘Relay Access Denied’

TLS just enables encryption on the smtp session and doesn't directly affect whether or not Postfix will be allowed to relay a message.

The relaying denied message occurs because the smtpd_recipient_restrictions rules was not matched. One of those conditions must be fulfilled to allow the message to go through:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
    permit_sasl_authenticated
    check_recipient_access hash:/etc/postfix/filtered_domains
    permit_mynetworks
    reject_unauth_destination

To explain those rules:

permit_sasl_authenticated

permits authenticated senders through SASL. This will be necessary to authenticate users outside of your network which are normally blocked.

check_recipient_access

This will cause postfix to look in /etc/postfix/filtered_domains for rules based on the recipient address. (Judging by the file name on the file name, it is probably just blocking specific domains... Check to see if gmail.com is listed in there?)

permit_mynetworks

This will permit hosts by IP address that match IP ranges specified in $mynetworks. In the main.cf you posted, $mynetworks was set to 127.0.0.1, so it will only relay emails generated by the server itself.

Based on that configuration, your mail client will need to use SMTP Authentication before being allowed to relay messages. I'm not sure what database SASL is using. That is specified in /usr/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf Presumably it also uses the same database as your virtual mailboxes, so you should be able enable SMTP authentication in your mail client and be all set.

Postfix enable sending to any domain in the Internet with authentication but no SSL

This looks less like an SSL issue than like an authentication problem; if Postfix recognizes you as an authorized sender then it should not be talking about relaying. Is your SMTP client configured to authenticate to the server? If not, set it up that way and try again.

One more thing: You've got permit_sasl_authenticated in your smtpd_recipient_restrictions, but I don't see any SASL auth configuration in your main.cf -- this may be the problem;

If Postfix is expecting to authenticate you via SASL, but doesn't have an SASL provider against which to do so, it will treat you as it would any other unauthenticated user. A full resolution is beyond the scope of this answer, but I'd recommend starting with the Postfix SASL howto, which helped me greatly when setting up my own Postfix server.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to correct Postfix’ ‘Relay Access Denied’

Postfix enable sending to any domain in the Internet with authentication but no SSL

Related Topic