Q: Why does my RT auto reply say "This transaction appears to have no content" ?

Context

• Request Tracker (RT) on help.mit.edu

Answer

Occasionally you may receive an email from a requestor in RT to with RT sends the normal auto-reply, but instead of including the text portions of the original message that was sent, the auto-reply will contain the line "This transaction appears to have no content". Here's what's going on...

RT can handle multi-part email messages that contain attachments, for example a plain text portion and an HTML version of the message, or a message portion and a digital signature file. A normal multi-part email message will often have a structure like this:

* text/plain
* text/html
* application/x-pkcs7-signature

In the above case, the message contains a plain text portion, a formatted HTML portion, and a digital signature file, all in a sequence, which is not a problem. In rare cases, and so far only in messages generated by Microsoft Outlook – often including a digital signature – a multi-part message may have a nested, hierarchical structure, for example like this:

* message/signed
** message/alternative
***   text/plain
***   text/html
** application/x-pkcs7-signature

The above message is similar to the previous one in terms of what's in it, but it contains nested sub-containers around the pieces of content.

RT is not able to fully recurse into all the sub-containers to pick out the text portion of the message. It will instead give up and send an auto-reply without the original message attached, and including the line "This transaction appears to have no content."

There is no work-around for this at the moment. It does not happen often, but please bring it to our attention if it does. It will help us determine whether we should pursue a consulting contract to enhance RT's email parsing capabilities in the future. As always, send report and questions to tooltime@mit.edu.