Date Posted: May 21, 2009

Author: Jared Heinrichs

Posted in ISP.

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MTS Webmail issue

It all started with one of my main clients…

A couple people complained about not seeing the contents of a replied email. The email was basically blank. Instead of showing me an example the “blank” emails were always deleted. I created a test:

Two users:

1. User A – is at work and uses Outlook all the time for sending and receiving messages.
2. User B – is more of a road warrior and and likes to use webmail at home or on the road.

Two external accounts outside MTS.

1. 1 Gmail User
2. 1 Shaw Webmail User

Steps taken to re-produce the issue.

This has been done several times and the outcome is very consistent

1. User A @ work sends User B an email. At the same time they CC the Shaw and Gmail users.
2. User B uses MTS webmail to REPLY to the email that “User A” just sent. (*A side note* The email format that “user B” received is HTML.)
3. User B hits reply, they can type in some text say “This is a test”. They send a REPLY back to “User A”
4. “User A” receives an email when they hit send/receive. If they open the email, the email shows the person’s original email. The line “This is a test” does NOT show up. If the person turns on “Autopreview”. This is the option to see the first few lines on the email in outlook. If you turn on the reading pane or open the email the text is missing.
5. If “User A” would have gone into MTS Webmail and tried viewing the email on the server BEFORE downloading it they can actually see the text. As soon as they download it’s encoded in such a way that outlook does not display the lines added by MTS’s webmail unless autopreview is on.
6. If the Gmail user and Shaw Users reply to the SAME email “User a”, they receive the email with “This is a test”.
7. If “User B” comes back to work and uses Outlook to send the email instead of webmail the result is the same as the Gmail and Shaw webmail.

I tried telling Outlook to view the email as plain text and that didn’t help. I’ve tried this on several computers at the WSO. From the above test it would seem like the MTS webmail corrupts the original format somehow and then Outlook can’t display the output.

How Client A’s Email client is setup

Screenshots of the Issue

This is what it looks like after receiving a “reply from MTS Webmail”. See how the text “This text will not show up from this reply” is in the autopreview? Yet on the right hand side in the email the text is missing. I have marked where the text should show up. (Click image to make it larger).

Here is an Example of a Reply from the same email that was CC’d to a Gmail client who also replied to the email.

Here is an Example of a Reply from the same email that was CC’d to a Shaw client who also replied to the email.

I also have saved these emails to a Outlook PST file just in case.