E-mail is sent as "inline" attachment instead of regular mail body

[salim-b]

Whenever I send an e-mail using blastula::smtp_send() the actual message is sent as an "inline attachment" which – at least in Thunderbird 60 with default settings – results in no (visual) text in the mail body unless you explicitly activate Display Attachments Inline.

In the code of smtp_send.R I see that mailsend-go's attach option is used with the -inline flag. I guess it would be better to use the body option instead (at least by default), so that all mail clients can properly display the message.

Or is there a specific reason why the attach option is used?

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I'm using the latest dev version of blastula on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 with latest mailsend-go v1.0.4.

[rich-iannone]

@salim-b Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this. Could you send a screenshot of a sample email in Thunderbird 60 that shows the issue?

[salim-b]

1. I just realized I'm using the add-on Thunderbird Conversations (latest version), though it doesn't really make any difference regarding this issue.

   Using this add-on, an e-mail sent by blastula::smtp_send() looks by default like this on my system:

   

2. When I deactivate the add-on, an e-mail sent by blastula::smtp_send() looks by default like this on my system:

   

3. After enabling Thunderbird's option Display Attachments Inline I just discovered another issue (haven't noticed it before): The encoding of the inline attached mail body is not properly auto-discovered! The mail is displayed in latin-1 instead of the actual UTF-8 encoding:

   

   The same mail sent using mailsend-go's body option displays fine by default:

   

[salim-b]

In the code of smtp_send.R I see that mailsend-go's attach option is used with the -inline flag. I guess it would be better to use the body option instead (at least by default), so that all mail clients can properly display the message.

To be more clear: Instead of this code

  run_args <-
    list(
      `-sub` = subject,
      `-smtp` = credentials$host,
      `-port` = credentials$port %>% as.character(),
      `-ssl` = ssl_opt,
      `auth` = no_options(),
      `-user` = credentials$user,
      `-pass` = credentials$password,
      `-fname` = sender_name_opt,
      `-from` = from,
      `-to` = to,
      `-cc` = cc,
      `-bcc` = bcc,
      `attach` = no_options(),
      `-file` = tempfile_,
      `-mime-type` = "text/html",
      `-inline` = no_options()
    )

I would suggest to use this (at least by default):

  run_args <-
    list(
      `-sub` = subject,
      `-smtp` = credentials$host,
      `-port` = credentials$port %>% as.character(),
      `-ssl` = ssl_opt,
      `auth` = no_options(),
      `-user` = credentials$user,
      `-pass` = credentials$password,
      `-fname` = sender_name_opt,
      `-from` = from,
      `-to` = to,
      `-cc` = cc,
      `-bcc` = bcc,
      `body` = no_options(),
      `-file` = tempfile_,
      `-mime-type` = "text/html"
    )

[fmichonneau]

I did a quick test and I can confirm that using the body option to pass the HTML file for the email instead of using attach displays the email correctly instead of showing an empty message with an attachment.