No Voicemail Attachment on Mac Mail?

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 23, 2008 Posts: 3

I recently made the switch from a PC notebook to the MacBook Pro. I'm using Apple's Mail program for my email. On my PC, voicemail's came through as an attachment. On my MacBook, the attachment is missing. I'm getting attachments from other senders, but not from Vonage. Anyone else have this issue or know how I can fix? Thanks.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Sep 26, 2008 Posts: 66

Barring the fact that you have already checked to see if there is a supported wav player in the mac, are you receiving emails from vonage, (email address changed?)if not may need to have your email address changed either in your vonage online acct or call into tech support to do this. Make sure the email notification setting in your vonage online acct is also enabled. There is a setting in Entourage (the MS equivalent of Outlook on the Mac) for how attachments should be encoded, with an option for Windows.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 24, 2008 Posts: 1

I'm having the same problems. I think Apple is stripping the .wav attachments from the emails that are being sent from Vonage.
If you send the same Vonage email (forward it) with a different sender address it will arrive on the .mac server with the attachment.
I believe apple is filtering the content of attachments based on it being sent by Vonage.

I have posted at the Apple discussion boards. Try to post there to ring attention to this problem.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1763802&tstart=0

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 23, 2008 Posts: 3

Slyster - There is a wav player plugin for Quicktime, which I have installed. I'm able to play other wav files with it. I do receive the emails from Vonage, but the attachment is stripped out. I can log on through webmail on MyDomain.com and the attachments are there. I'm using the Mail program on MacBook, not Entourage. I was not able to locate the attachment coding in Mail. Do you know if there is one?

Kodachrome, Thanks for the link to the apple discussion board. I'll post over there too. I'm not using the .mac server, but a POP server account. There seems to be some filtering by Mac through the Mail program. Not sure what's going on.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 25, 2008 Posts: 3

I am also having this problem. The .wav file is still present. It has not been stripped. You can download the file if you view it from within the Apple mobileme web client at me.com. However, it won't show up in Mail. It won't show on an iphone. It is really annoying... all these things used to work about a week ago....

Posts: 109 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Jun 21, 2005 Posts: 109

it works on my mac mail

it comes thru as a player embedded inside the email

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 25, 2008 Posts: 3

Opening the message and View - Raw Source shows attachment but Mail app ignores it.

The messages contain the Attachment for sure. This is also new for my family. It was busted a few weeks ago and started to work again. Now it is busted again.

Changing the email settings on the vonage site seemed to help for a bit.

This really seems like a mail.app issue. But why would it have changed twice over the past month?

I've not done any Apple Updates (as a matter of course i wait a few weeks before running software update). Nothing has changed on my mac.

update: this may be unrelated but I found that
The compression is ulaw 2:1 and the DataRate of all of the files that do not work is below 64KBITS (63.97). All messages that are sent with DataRates at or above 64KBITS (64.01) WORK!!!!

I sent this along to Vonage support.

Update to update:

It is not the compression but the way the messages are being attached. If you save the "invisible" attachment to your desktop and send that attachment to yourself in a new email it will work. Mail.app doesn't like the way Vonage is attaching the attachment.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 27, 2008 Posts: 2

I also have been seeing this problem with the missing .wav files in Apple Mail, but I am starting to think the problem is with how Vonage is formatting the emails.

I went back and looked at the raw source for an older email where the .wav attachment does appear and the raw source for a newer email message that does not display the .wav attachment.

What I discovered is that the Content-type fields are different.

The content-type should be multipart/mixed, but in the broken file it reads multipart/related.

Also there is an additional text block in the broken file that reads...

This is a multi-part message in MIME format
--===============8937520241106189529==
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="===============8362608781052086719=="
MIME-Version: 1.0

This entire block of text is missing from the email file that correctly displays the attachment.

Also note that the body of the broken message seems to contain both these boundary text strings, while the file that works only contains the boundary string denoted in the header "Content-type" field.

Date: Oct 26 2008 05:45:54 PM
From: 15084781786
To : me (vonage number)
--===============8362608781052086719==--
--===============8937520241106189529==
Content-Type: audio/x-wav
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="voice-message.wav"

So apparently, something seems to have changed in the way the voicemail emails with attachments are being sent by Vonage. not only is the Content-type different, but there are now two boundary test strings when before there was just the one.

Take a look for yourself and see if you identify the same issue.

I'm using Leopard 10.5.5 using Apple Mail 3.5.

You'll find your email files are stored as .emlx files. Look in ~/Library/Mail, then find the folder that corresponds with your email account. The .emlx files will be in the INBOX.mbox/Messages folder (assuming you haven't moved them).

To locate the file I wanted I used Quick Look (spacebar) and scrolled through the files quickly using the up and down arrow keys. Once I found the email I wanted to examine, I right clicked it (Command-Click) and chose Open With > Other... and selected TexEdit.

Compare the source of a file that displays the attachment with one that doesn't display the attachment.

I honestly don't think Apple Mail is guilty here since the headers were munged up when I viewed them using my ISP's (Verizon) webmail so Apple Mail can't be at fault, though some might argue that it could handle this formatting better. I haven't yet investigated how other email clients handle the new format.

Oh, and I edited the malformed .emlx file, saved it and then restarted Apple Mail. The once broken message is now displaying the .wav attachment after editing and "repairing" the .emlx file.

Jeff

Posts: 646 · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 12:33 pm Post subject:

While you are correct that there was change made on the Vonage side which did change the headers, this change is well with spec of the RFC. It is an issue of how the application interprets the header and is technically a Mac issue and is why other mail applications were unaffected. The change only affected the way it displayed for you. If you would have gone to Edit, Open File attachment, it would have played.

This change was just rolled back to accommodate Mac Mail / iPHONE users so you should now be able to play the attachment as you did before. Please note that another upgrade will be coming to address other issues. It should be patched in a way that this attachment issue does not occur however, you may or may not notice a change to user experience.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 25, 2008 Posts: 3

Huh? I think I understand what you are saying, however, I am unable to play the files within Apple Mail or on my iphone. They used to work fine on both. Now neither works. In Mail, you must go to File->Save Attachments... and then open the .wav file in iTunes or Quicktime to play it. It used to simply show a player within Mail. The iphone simply doesn't show the attachment at all. There used to be a link one could click to download the .wav file and it would then play on the phone. Now, no dice!

If Vonage would change things back to the way they were before, all would be fine...

VonTechMgr wrote:

While you are correct that there was change made on the Vonage side which did change the headers, this change is well with spec of the RFC. It is an issue of how the application interprets the header and is technically a Mac issue and is why other mail applications were unaffected. The change only affected the way it displayed for you. If you would have gone to Edit, Open File attachment, it would have played.

This change was just rolled back to accommodate Mac Mail / iPHONE users so you should now be able to play the attachment as you did before. Please note that another upgrade will be coming to address other issues. It should be patched in a way that this attachment issue does not occur however, you may or may not notice a change to user experience.