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The body of a message is shown incorrectly as an attachment when you send the message that has attachments in an Exchange Server environment

Original KB number:  969854

Symptoms

An email message that has an attachment is sent from an application in a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange Server 2010 environment. The email message also has a text body part that's specified after the attachment body part. When a user receives the email message, the body of the message is shown incorrectly as an attachment together with the attachment that's sent by the application. When this issue occurs, the message that's sent from the application is displayed as follows:

MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="exchange" This is a message with multiple parts in MIME format. --exchange Content-type: application/octet-stream Content-transfer-encoding: base64 PGh0bWw+CiAgPGhlYWQ+CiAgPC9oZWFkPgogIDxib2R5PgogICAgPHA+VGhpcyBpcyB0aGUg Ym9keSBvZiB0aGUgbWVzc2FnZS48L3A+CiAgPC9ib2R5Pgo8L2h0bWw+Cg== --exchange Content-type: text/plain This is the body of the message. --exchange--

Cause

This issue occurs when an attachment body part in an email message is sent before the message body part of the email message is sent. This issue occurs because the message is sent by the application in an incorrect format. Based on the "Mixed Subtype" definition that's mentioned in section 5.1.3 of RFC 2046, the "mixed" subtype of "multipart" is intended for use when the body parts are independent and have to be bundled in a particular order. Any "multipart" subtypes that an implementation doesn't recognize must be treated as being of "mixed" subtype.

Resolution

If you change the order of the body parts in the application, the issue will be resolved. In this case, the correct order of the email message should be shown as follows:

MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="exchange" This is a message with multiple parts in MIME format. --exchange Content-type: text/plain <This is the body of the message.> --exchange Content-type: application/octet-stream Content-transfer-encoding: base64 PGh0bWw+CiAgPGhlYWQ+CiAgPC9oZWFkPgogIDxib2R5PgogICAgPHA+VGhpcyBpcyB0aGUg Ym9keSBvZiB0aGUgbWVzc2FnZS48L3A+CiAgPC9ib2R5Pgo8L2h0bWw+Cg== --exchange--

Status

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.