[Building Sakai] Thunderbird puts mime type application/applefile; mailarchive discards attachment

[Matthew Jones]

I think option 3 as mentioned is the best, it shouldn't trust the browser
(or email client) if it's providing incorrect information, and the detection
libraries are pretty good.

Sakai doesn't currently contain any thing like this but it reminds me that I
had planned to work on the related item KNL-101/SAK-18032 which would use
the mime-util library to detect the file type. However I was waiting for
Stephen Marquard to finish KNL-325 and forgot about it. (Or was waiting for
someone else to do it first)

If you file this/assign it to me [ or implement it :) ], I'll put it near
the top of my todo list before 2.8, as they should all be pretty easy to fix
now. It should be able to be back ported to 2.7.x, but unlikely anything
earlier.

-Matthew

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Joshua Swink <joshua.swink at gmail.com> wrote:

> We're having a problem with the mail archive quietly discarding
> message attachments. This starts with the user's email client.
> Thunderbird will frequently, and improperly, assign a MIME type of
> "application/applefile" to various attachments, such as Word documents
> and PDFs. The Sakai mail archive will therefore silently discard the
> attachment before forwarding the message.
>
> The mail archive does it with the following code in SakaiMailet.java
>
>                // Discard parts with mime-type application/applefile. If an
> e-mail
> message contains an attachment is sent from
>                // a macintosh, you may get two parts, one for the data fork
> and one
> for the resource fork. The part that
>                // corresponds to the resource fork confuses users, this has
> mime-type application/applefile. The best thing
>                // is to discard it.
>                else if (p.isMimeType("application/applefile"))
>                {
>                        M_log.warn(this+" message with application/applefile
> discarded");
>                }
>
> A quick look at the current trunk shows that this is still the case:
>
>
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/mailarchive/trunk/mailarchive-james/james/src/java/org/sakaiproject/james/SakaiMailet.java
>
> I need to find a way for the attachments to go through. Options include:
>
> -- Stop discarding application/applefile attachments. This would
> surely allow the desired attachments through, though it would also
> allow resource forks through, which I don't particularly want.
> -- Stop discarding application/applefile attachments under some set of
> arbitrary conditions. Such as: the user-agent contains "Thunderbird",
> or the attachment name contains ".doc" or ".pdf". This is very hacky
> and would provide only a partial, short-lived, and messy solution.
> -- Whenever an attachment has the MIME type application/applefile, get
> a second opinion from some software on the server. If this results in
> some other type than application/applefile, allow the attachment to
> stay. This would be very nice, if the software is already in Sakai and
> is readily accessible.
>
> Questions. Are there any better ideas? Does Sakai contain software
> that could be used to analyze attachments to determine their MIME
> types?
>
> Thanks for any assistance.
>
> --
> Joshua Swink
> UC Merced Enterprise Web Applications
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