Strange email issue

06/11/2011 | Google | 15 Comments

I am having a really strange email issue here and I just can not figure out what is going on. Then I thought to myself only really smart people read my blog, why not ask them. There is a contact form on this site that collects name email and comments. This is just a simple way for visitors of the site to get in touch with me.

I originally had the email sending from my Gmail account to the same account. This raised a red flag and Gmail flagged it as spam. I ended up changing the from address to my Google Apps domain and I was now getting the email but there was still one problem. No matter where the email is coming from Gmail is stripping the body content of the email and I end up with something like this.

I thought maybe something was wrong with my code so I double checked it and quickly realized I never write bad code (joke). I changed the to address to my work email and sure enough it came through fine. In Gmail you can click on a drop down to the right and show the original which is the raw email headers and all.

As you can see the email content is there but for whatever reason Gmail does not want me to see it. Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it?

This entry was posted on June 11, 2011 at 12:26 PM and has received 1656 views. Comments 15 | Print this entry.

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#1 by Steve S on 6/11/11 - 2:53 PM

We've encountered trouble with gmail stripping HTML tags. Try starting either with plain text, or without the HTML and body tags in your HTML email, and see if that does the trick. If so, work up from there.
#2 by Curt Gratz on 6/11/11 - 3:08 PM

Dan, are you using script to send the mail. I have seen that issue if you don't use addPart and just set the body. If you are try something like this.

var mail = new mail();
mail.setSubject("Contact Us");
mail.setTo("toAddress@c.com");
mail.setFrom("fromAddress@c.com");
mail.addPart(type="html", body=body);
mail.send();

Curt
#3 by Peter Boughton on 6/11/11 - 3:28 PM

I would guess Gmail is showing you the non-HTML version of the email, which is blank.

If so, there's two options:

Option 1: Identify where the text/plain content is coming from and remove it.

Option 2: Explicitly provide a text/plain version of the content, either in addition to, or instead of, the HTML version.
#4 by Stephen Moretti on 6/11/11 - 6:58 PM

make sure that if you have seen text and html mail part that the text part comes first.
If you have mail parts make sure you haven't specified as mime type on the cfmail tag.
#5 by Ken Hughes on 6/11/11 - 7:27 PM

Have you checked your settings in Gmail? Specifically External content and, possibly, Snippets.
#6 by Ken Hughes on 6/11/11 - 8:52 PM

A couple more suggestions spring to mind: Have you looked at the email in a hex editor to see if there are any non-ascii characters being embedded that would not show up in raw text, but may prevent a display in HTML?

Have you done a Ctrl+A on the HTML email to see if the characters are there, but are in white?
#7 by Dan Vega on 6/11/11 - 10:02 PM

@Steve S - I tried stripping out the html,body and head tags but I am still having the same issue.

@Curt - This is what my service looks like http://pastebin.com/Cd6DuLTQ
#8 by Dan Vega on 6/11/11 - 10:10 PM

I just tried a plain old cfmail tag and it came through just fine. I think something is up with the ColdBox mail service. I must not be doing something right. Is there anything wrong with this http://pastebin.com/Cd6DuLTQ
#9 by Sumit Verma on 6/12/11 - 10:19 AM

@Dan,

For html email you should use charset=ISO-8859-1. For plain text you can use utf-8.

ALso, when using both, plain text should come before html.
#10 by Jules Gravinese on 6/12/11 - 10:32 AM

In the way you added the HTML part to the email, also add a plain text part. Or simply use plain text entirely (at least for a test).
#11 by Curt Gratz on 6/13/11 - 7:33 AM

The ColdBox MailService just uses the regular cfmail tag, so not sure why that would be different. I don't see anything wrong with the code you posted.
#12 by Dan G. Switzer, II on 6/13/11 - 10:31 AM

It also seems odd that things are going through as 7bit encoding.
#13 by Sue G on 10/7/11 - 12:03 PM

I don't know if you figured this out (i'm assuming, since this was 4 months ago, it is fixed), but I just ran into this myself and fixed it.

I was doing:

mailer.setType('text');
mailer.addPart(type='text',body=emailContents);
mailer.send();

and I could see the source of the email, but it would be blank (this was in Outlook).

I just switched my code to:

mailer.setType('text');
mailer.send(body=emailContents);

and it works fine now. Maybe this can help someone else. Not sure why the former does not work when it worked back in August (for us, anyways).
#14 by Dan Vega on 10/10/11 - 12:03 PM

I am basically doing the same thing.. here is my code.

http://pastebin.com/knNVdLyU
#15 by Dan Vega on 10/10/11 - 12:04 PM

It is still happening so I might just switch over the contact form to simply use cfmail.