Hi Wiktor, Wiktor Wodecki schrieb:

I recently updated our installation from 2.1.6 to 2.1.7. After the smooth update our users started to complain about binary attachments being mangled when send via email. After some checking I found out, that attachments which are send via email will be encoded by the Send() function in the Email objects at around line 269:

<snip> # content encode $Self->{EncodeObject}->EncodeOutput(\$Upload{Content}); # attach file to email </snip>

I did double-check and the otrs did this at least back to 2.1.2, but only on the way from 2.1.6 to 2.1.7 the behaviour caused problems on our site. I "fixed" our issue by commenting the line out, but I'm not sure whether I just opened up a can of worms.

Could somebody with a more in-depth view of the relevant code paths please explain to me why the encoding is neccessary at this point?

We got some bugs before because if OTRS is running in utf-8 and you are sending not encoded utf-8 chars to sendmail or to the smtp backend you will get "wide character..." warnings and the delivered email is damaged. :-(

BTW, we're using UTF-8 for everything and perl 5.8.5 on linux.

So maybe it is an issue with your used perl 5.8.5, because there are some utf-8 problems. So in your case perhaps it's only working fine with your modification. %-) Anyway, I would recomment to use perl 5.8.8 (it's released about 1,5 years ago). Greetings, -Martin