Exchange / HTML email issue

Dante · 22nd July 2008, 13:29

Hi Guys,

Due to some brilliant offshore coding, my customer has an app which mails out HTML email with the <html> tag missing from the source of the message. The </html> tag is present at the end tho - so they did half a job.

Now from my understanding - some mail clients (later versions of MS Outlook) can still display the message as they can inteprete it as HTML anyway - without the tags, but some 'other' as yet unspecified mail client (possibly web mail) cannot.

The messages are sent from this app, through a box running Exchange 2k3 and MIMEsweeper. Is there any way to add this tag in?

I know with MIMEsweeper you can add a footer to teh message (e.g a disclaimer), but didn't know if you could touch the source rather than the 'display text'.

If not - i've also heard of ways of using VBscript in Exchange to maybe do something, but can't see much about that on the University of Google.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Dan

DimPrawn · 22nd July 2008, 13:40

Are you saying the offshore code monkeys can't supply a fix or that there is no source code available to fix yourself? That is madness!

If you can intercept the email before it reaches the mail server, you could create a simple program to add the <html> tag in using a regular expression.

Does the app send email via SMTP? If so, create a listener SMTP service in C# that uses the regex to fix the text before sending it on to the correct SMTP server.

TheBigYinJames · 22nd July 2008, 13:41

Also make sure that you flag the stupid error to the highest level of the company so that we get a general awareness around upper management about how much expensive rework of this kind is often required from outsourced IT developments.

Dante · 22nd July 2008, 13:45

Hi Dimprawn,

Thanks for the swift reply.

Regarding the code - i'm told it's closed source and that's that.

It's being sent by an app (not seen it yet) and is then relayed via the Exchange / MIMEsweeper box via SMTP.

I'm not a developer by any means (merely an infrastructure monkey) so any advice is greatly appreciated. Anything beyond basic VBscript / WSH is beyond me at the moment - hence why i was looking for a solution within the software or a simple script bolt-on.

In what way would I be best off intercepting the mail? I have visibilty of it from source server through to Exchange - can I use a regular expression to add the tag at some point on this path? Is it as simple as adding text to any file or is there something more complex with email messages?
Thanks again for your time,

Dan

DimPrawn · 22nd July 2008, 14:44

Sorry I know nothing about Exchange server.

Sounds like the sort of challenge you could put up on www.rentacoder.com

Dante · 22nd July 2008, 14:59

I think that's where they went wrong in the first place!