Truncated Emails

Here's an odd one - I developed a somewhat sophisticated hack of a system for one of our larger clients to generate emails. Basically it hooks a large user database (complete with associated order information) to a WYSIWYG editor and template system so they can send out customized, mail merged emails. It works pretty well. But the issue at hand was reports from users of RoadRunner (specifically the NYCAP region) were receiving truncated versions of the emails - the text of the email would simply cut off at some point in the email - not the same place every time either.

I tested the emails on every email server I could find - including RoadRunner (but of the TWCNY region) and they all worked fine. The reports continued, and all were from users of the NYCAP RoadRunner. So I did some more digging and found one resource :

Truncated emails with tcp.sendMail

which humbly suggests at the bottom of the post that some email servers will truncate emails that have more than a specified number of characters per line. The emails I have been sending out are big blobs of HTML I get by screen scraping a page generated by the system (for the mail merge). Never would have guessed that one.

I solved (hopefully) the issue by manipulating the scraped string and adding vbCrLf's after paragraph tags and closing column tags (</td>) ...

Sigh...