Help me get emails from my clients blackberry
April 16, 2008 7:37 AM Subscribe
My clients emails from their Blackberry always end up in my email providers spam quarantine with the text of the mail garbled. Their "from address" comes through on the headers as From: "=?utf-8?B?SmVzc2UgUmFiaW5vd2l0eg==?=". My email provider says my client needs to fix that. My client thinks that they don't have a problem. Is this the way that blackberry emails normally identify themselves in email headers or is my clients set up faulty?
Really Burhanistan? I administer both BIS and BES Blackberries for my firm and I've never seen that. Sorry to have misled you merocet.
posted by The Bellman at 7:44 AM on April 16, 2008
posted by The Bellman at 7:44 AM on April 16, 2008
Response by poster: According to my email provider nearlyfreespeech.net they cannot change the spam quarantine filter at their end and they insist that the clients Blackberry is wrongly configured. I can't configure the safelist as it's fixed by the email provider with no user access.
Unfortunately I have no access to a Blackberry to fiddle around with things. I receive messages from other peoples Blackberry's with no problem so I'm thinking it is a problem with my client company's config.
The client is using a corporate Blackberry email setup as far as I know. The info in their email header says From: "=?utf-8?B?SmVzc2UgUmFiaW5vd2l0eg==?=" if that helps?
posted by merocet at 7:57 AM on April 16, 2008
Unfortunately I have no access to a Blackberry to fiddle around with things. I receive messages from other peoples Blackberry's with no problem so I'm thinking it is a problem with my client company's config.
The client is using a corporate Blackberry email setup as far as I know. The info in their email header says From: "=?utf-8?B?SmVzc2UgUmFiaW5vd2l0eg==?="
posted by merocet at 7:57 AM on April 16, 2008
Best answer: That gobbledygook actually says "Jesse Rabinowitz". It's base 64 encoded UTF-8 data, in this case not very helpful since ASCII would have worked fine. Email does header encoding games frequently, although I'd have to read the RFCs with a fine-toothed comb to understand exactly what the standard says. Either the sender has forgotten to set some magic header to flag that the headers aren't plain ASCII or the email client needs to be a little smarter guessing what format the data is in.
Does the Blackberry have a setting for the encoding on outgoing emails? If your client sets it to ASCII you probably won't see this problem anymore, although then your client will only be able to spell English correctly.
What email client software are you using? What mail server and spam filter?
posted by Nelson at 7:58 AM on April 16, 2008 [1 favorite]
Does the Blackberry have a setting for the encoding on outgoing emails? If your client sets it to ASCII you probably won't see this problem anymore, although then your client will only be able to spell English correctly.
What email client software are you using? What mail server and spam filter?
posted by Nelson at 7:58 AM on April 16, 2008 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: gah it says the clients actual corporate email address in between the "less than, greater than" brackets after the From: "=?utf-8?B?SmVzc2UgUmFiaW5vd2l0eg==?=" " but metafilter won't show that.
posted by merocet at 8:00 AM on April 16, 2008
posted by merocet at 8:00 AM on April 16, 2008
Best answer: It's one way of handling unicode in the email headers. Oracle Calendar does this a lot too.
Your email provider is unwilling to help you? Really? I'd look at getting another provider. As the world becomes more global, addresses like this will become more popular.
posted by sbutler at 8:05 AM on April 16, 2008
Your email provider is unwilling to help you? Really? I'd look at getting another provider. As the world becomes more global, addresses like this will become more popular.
posted by sbutler at 8:05 AM on April 16, 2008
Best answer: According to my email provider nearlyfreespeech.net they cannot change the spam quarantine filter at their end and they insist that the clients Blackberry is wrongly configured. I can't configure the safelist as it's fixed by the email provider with no user access.
I guess the emphasis with them is on "nearly". Problems with this specific person aside, it's ludicrous for someone to offer hosted email (for cost, let alone free) and not offer whitelisting. That's some serious BS.
posted by mkultra at 8:07 AM on April 16, 2008
I guess the emphasis with them is on "nearly". Problems with this specific person aside, it's ludicrous for someone to offer hosted email (for cost, let alone free) and not offer whitelisting. That's some serious BS.
posted by mkultra at 8:07 AM on April 16, 2008
Response by poster: Aha, I have my business email forwarded from my email provider into my gmail acount but the email is quarantined by the email provider I use for my company email before it's forwarded on to my gmail account so I don't think gmail is the problem.
posted by merocet at 8:09 AM on April 16, 2008
posted by merocet at 8:09 AM on April 16, 2008
Response by poster: Thanks for all the info people. I've emailed my email provider again with the info you provided and await a response. If there's nothing helpful forthcoming I'll be shifting my email to another provider. Any recommendations for email providers that will have this not be a problem?
posted by merocet at 8:16 AM on April 16, 2008
posted by merocet at 8:16 AM on April 16, 2008
Best answer: A little more information: my name is Stephen Butler. Fortunately, each character in my name can be represented as a 7-bit number using the US-ASCII encoding. Woo hoo! E-mail was designed for me.
But suppose my name is Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й. Arg... none of those letters are in the 7-bit ASCII encoding. So what to do? According to RFC2047 I encode my name with UTF-8 (each character in my name is broken into a series of 8-bit characters). But that's still not suitable for email headers, so I have to encode it a second time with base64. Finally, I end up with =?utf-8?B?0JvQtdCyINCd0LjQutC+0LvQsMyB0LXQstC40Ycg0KLQvtC70YHRgtC+zIHQuQ==?=.
Ugly? Perhaps. But almost all email clients understand it. Even Thunderbird, one of the most basic email clients out there, will properly display my name.
So, that your provider will not fix this is unacceptable. Their email service is broken, or at least horribly deficient for the modern world. They refuse to accept approved standards and are probably losing you clients. I might even go as far to say that they're breaking the internet.
Find someone else who would let you receive mail from Leo Tolstoy.
(Also, as should be obvious by now, this is not some crazy Blackberry scheme to verify email addresses. Neither are they doing anything wrong. It's your provider's fault they can't handle valid messages.)
posted by sbutler at 8:28 AM on April 16, 2008
But suppose my name is Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й. Arg... none of those letters are in the 7-bit ASCII encoding. So what to do? According to RFC2047 I encode my name with UTF-8 (each character in my name is broken into a series of 8-bit characters). But that's still not suitable for email headers, so I have to encode it a second time with base64. Finally, I end up with =?utf-8?B?0JvQtdCyINCd0LjQutC+0LvQsMyB0LXQstC40Ycg0KLQvtC70YHRgtC+zIHQuQ==?=.
Ugly? Perhaps. But almost all email clients understand it. Even Thunderbird, one of the most basic email clients out there, will properly display my name.
So, that your provider will not fix this is unacceptable. Their email service is broken, or at least horribly deficient for the modern world. They refuse to accept approved standards and are probably losing you clients. I might even go as far to say that they're breaking the internet.
Find someone else who would let you receive mail from Leo Tolstoy.
(Also, as should be obvious by now, this is not some crazy Blackberry scheme to verify email addresses. Neither are they doing anything wrong. It's your provider's fault they can't handle valid messages.)
posted by sbutler at 8:28 AM on April 16, 2008
Response by poster: Thats great ammunition everyone. Thanks so much.
posted by merocet at 8:32 AM on April 16, 2008
posted by merocet at 8:32 AM on April 16, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by The Bellman at 7:40 AM on April 16, 2008