request-tracker and winmail.dat or MS-TNEF

Outlook likes putting attachments and other crap in a stupid attachment called ‘winmail.dat’. Request-tracker doe not like this and neither do I. On debian, install the ‘ytnef’ package. ‘/usr/bin/ytnef-filter’ appears to be the ‘ytnefprocess.pl’ script metioned in the README file. Make sure you’ve got the perl package MIME requrements. I didn’t have to but you may need to install the ‘libmime-perl’ package. Then modify your RT email configuration to look like this:

helpdesk: "|/usr/bin/ytnef-filter|/usr/bin/rt-mailgate \
--queue helpdesk --action correspond \
 --url http://rt.example.com"
helpdesk-comment: "|/usr/bin/ytnef-filter|/usr/bin/rt-mailgate \
--queue helpdesk --action comment \
 --url http://rt.example.com"

That’s two lines altogether. WordPress sucks with this stuff. It’ll filter out the attachments it can, the useful ones like actual file attachments and leave the rest alone, like the proprietary MS crap.

3 thoughts on “request-tracker and winmail.dat or MS-TNEF

  1. Torsten Brumm

    Sorry to bother you again. at the logfile (exim) i got this:

    2008-09-10 15:53:12 1KdS0G-0002o4-TF ** |/usr/local/bin/ytnef-filter|/opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate –queue RT-TEST-QUEUE –action correspond –url http://ticket.in
    t.kn R=system_aliases T=address_pipe: Child process of address_pipe transport returned 127 (could mean unable to exec or command does n
    ot exist) from command: /usr/local/bin/ytnef-filter|/opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate

    but the files are there and have 755 from the rights point of view.

    Any ides????

  2. btm Post author

    @Torsten

    I didn’t rename anything, I installed the debian ytnef package. I believe the ‘ytnef-filter’ program is ‘ytnefprocess.pl’ that comes from upstream and the debian renames it when it installs the package.

    Have you tried running the program by hand? Take a message in mbox format with an attachment and then cat it and pipe it to the program and see what happens. It may uncover more debugging information, such as an error message.

    If you don’t have mail in mbox format anywhere, I’ve used aid4mail in the past to convert outlook emails to mbox format. You could also do something like send an email with attachments to a nonexistent domain and then go grab the message out of your spool directory on the mail server.

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