mailx command sends mail body as attachment (noname)

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 3 comments

Published on November 2nd 2012 - Listed in Linux Mail

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For a while now I experienced a strange behavior on a monthly executed cron script, which is installed on three different servers. The cron script launches an SQL query and mails the output as body to my e-mail address. 

The strange behavior? The e-mail received from one out of the three servers is empty, instead of a body a file is attached called "noname". All scripts are exactly the same. As mail binary, mailx is used on all machines.

Today I looked into this and mailx != mailx. There are different versions of mailx around and depending on which version you have installed, the treatment of a mail can be very different. So I compared the installed mailx binaries on the different servers.

Working Server:

# dpkg -l | grep mailx
ii  bsd-mailx          8.1.2-0.20071201cvs-3       A simple mail user agent
ii  mailx              1:20071201-3                Transitional package for mailx rename

Broken Server (sent the noname attachment):

# dpkg -l | grep mailx
ii  heirloom-mailx     12.4-2     feature-rich BSD mail(1)

The difference is easy to see. heirloom-mailx seems to have problems with some output. As the working server is an older version of Debian, the mailx package is now included in the mailutils package. 

# apt-get remove heirloom-mailx
# apt-get install mailutils

After the installation of mailutils, /usr/bin/mailx was back and the e-mail now contained the output in the body part.

Side Note: The issue only happened with a certain output (maybe length of row?). A simple echo worked fine:

echo -ne "bla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla\nbla" | mailx -s Test mymail@example.com

But the MySQL output was attached to the file. Same if I wrote the output first to a file and then wanted to send the content with cat.

Update November 5th 2012:
I just took a look with my colleague at the mail headers. The mail sent by heirloom-mailx wrongly defined the mail as octet-stream (a binary). That must be the reason, why my mail client attached the content instead of showing it in body:

User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.4 7/29/08
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

But why does heirloom-mailx define the content as octet-stream? Our guess is that the data, coming from a ISO-8859-1 database, is then handled by the UTF8 system encoding and forwarded to mailx. The system then doesn't know the ISO characters and therefore doesn't see the content as text/ascii, ergo defining the content as binary.

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Comments (newest first)

Francisco Maia from Portugal wrote on Aug 25th, 2015:

Hey Psype,

Thank you, you just saved my day.
Lost an hour with this same problem.
The strings command fixed my script.

See you,
Francisco

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Psype from France wrote on Nov 20th, 2013:

I was experiencing the same problem, but only when I had special chars to send.

adding a "strings" to my command, which will only prints... well, printable chars, worked like a charm.

echo "toto\033\010tata" | strings | mailx [...]

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Alexandre Magno from Natal-RN, Brazil wrote on Mar 7th, 2013:

If content all is utf-8, it works. For example: cat two utf-8 files; no make union of iso-8859-1 and utf-8 files. I use Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.

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