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FogBugz Technical Support

A lot of our customers use japanese email clients (e.g. Becky, http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm ), which default in splitting emails in chunks of .5, 1 or 2 MB, encoded in MIME multipart/mixed. Believe us, we tried to educate them not to use that feature, but as soon as a new user emails us, we're back where we were.

We deal with these emails manually by pulling our support email also into Exchange, saving the attachments and combining/decoding the emails with Total Commander, http://www.ghisler.com/ . Sadly Microsoft dropped multipart/mixed support in Outlook with version XP, it was in Outlook 2000, I believe still is in Outlook Express 6.

Our issues:
- Each partial mail becomes a new case, nothing you can do about that. I'm fine with duping the cases.
- Firefox has issues with rendering hex-strings longer than a certain threshold, the content just disappears.
- If a conversation goes back and forth a little, we soon run into ASP's response buffer size limit. Of course you could raise that above 5 or 10MB, but that's no valid "fix".

Fixes that come to my mind:
- Detect that long hex-junk in the bug event, and don't put these in the response page.
- Allow admin deletion of bug events, like removal of bug attachments. (Please refrain from suggesting "go to your database"--we're using MSSQL Server, so it's basically not accessible to our support staff)

Any chance for a Fogcreek comment?

Hi Thomas,

Sorry for the delay.  We rely on a 3rd party tool for most of our mail handling, but I suspect if Outlook doesn't do the right thing, then its unlikely they would make changes to the tool to do change its behavior.

I'm just not sure there's a way for us to make a change without affecting other users.  If more people are interested in these changes, we'll definitely consider this case.  Currently though, we do ship the source code so you could make these changes locally.

I made a screenshot of the problematic email display. This hex-data stuff continues down the page for thousands of lines. I repeat my request that you (being the ASP developers here) just skip email bodies like these when creating the return page. Maybe involve the bayesian filter--the user could mark a couple of these emails as "Please hide stuff like this", andf the filter would pick it up in the future.

http://static.flickr.com/25/41078748_b150ae9e42_o.gif

Sincerely, Thomas Stache