Amazon no longer recognizes attachments...

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Recently (the past month or two?) I've noticed that Amazon's "email a
file to your Kindle" functionality has stopped worked when I email files
from Gnus. No matter what the file format, Amazon always primly informs
me that there was no attachment on my email. I use this a *lot*, so it's
kind of annoying.

I don't think Message mode has changed anything substantial recently, so
I'm assuming it's just Amazon having adjusted how they parse incoming
emails.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas on how we
could make message attachments more "attachment-y"?

Hopefully,
Eric

[Steinar Bang]

Post by Eric Abrahamsen
I don't think Message mode has changed anything substantial recently, so
I'm assuming it's just Amazon having adjusted how they parse incoming
emails.
Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas on how we
could make message attachments more "attachment-y"?

If you know what works for sending an attachment to kindle, you could
try sending a message to yourself and examine the attachment headers of
a Gnus created message with the one that works.

On a side note: I suggest trying out calibre for managing non-amazon
ebooks on your kindle.

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Post by Steinar Bang

Post by Eric Abrahamsen
I don't think Message mode has changed anything substantial recently, so
I'm assuming it's just Amazon having adjusted how they parse incoming
emails.
Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas on how we
could make message attachments more "attachment-y"?

If you know what works for sending an attachment to kindle, you could
try sending a message to yourself and examine the attachment headers of
a Gnus created message with the one that works.

You're right, I was being lazy :) I'll try this out.

Post by Steinar Bang
On a side note: I suggest trying out calibre for managing non-amazon
ebooks on your kindle.

I've used calibre in the past, but you still have to plug the kindle in!
"Email and forget about it" has been so nice...

[Steinar Bang]

Post by Eric Abrahamsen

Post by Steinar Bang
On a side note: I suggest trying out calibre for managing non-amazon
ebooks on your kindle.

I've used calibre in the past, but you still have to plug the kindle in!

<Off-topic for Gnus but calibre is GPLv3 so I'll risk it>
Not really. You have two options, possibly three:
- Calibre can start an HTTP server that can be browsed from the web
browser of the ebook reader to download books
- Calibre can email the books to your ebook reader, either manually or automatically(*)
- The web server of calibre can offer up an OPDS feed that some ebook
readers (e.g. FBReaderJ) can consume

(*) automatically may not make sense for novels, but if you have a
calibre newsfeed plugin that creates an ebook version of your
favourite web newspaper, you may want to email it to your reader as
soon as the day's edition is ready, see these for examples:
https://github.com/steinarb/calibre-recipes
</Off-topic for Gnus but calibre is GPLv3 so I'll risk it>

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Post by Steinar Bang

Post by Eric Abrahamsen
I don't think Message mode has changed anything substantial recently, so
I'm assuming it's just Amazon having adjusted how they parse incoming
emails.
Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas on how we
could make message attachments more "attachment-y"?

If you know what works for sending an attachment to kindle, you could
try sending a message to yourself and examine the attachment headers of
a Gnus created message with the one that works.
On a side note: I suggest trying out calibre for managing non-amazon
ebooks on your kindle.

Huh, I may have figured this out. The problem might have been that I
didn't include any text in the message body, only the attachment. With
no text in the message body, Message mode produces this:

Return-Path: <***@ericabrahamsen.net>
From: Eric Abrahamsen <***@ericabrahamsen.net>
To: Eric Abrahamsen <***@kindle.com>
Subject: test
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 17:09:19 +0800
User-Agent: Gnus/5.130014 (Ma Gnus v0.14) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/rtf
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=test.rtf
X-TUID: JzwQKAkDYpEH

{\rtf1\ansi\deff3\adeflang1025
... RTF file elided ...
This is only a test}
\par }


While Apple Mail, sending the same file, also with no body text,
produces:

From: someone else's address
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="Apple-Mail=_B94D16E3-387D-4897-88E8-40D79B80879C"
Subject: test
To: ***@kindle.com
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 8.2 \(2102\))


--Apple-Mail=_B94D16E3-387D-4897-88E8-40D79B80879C
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=test.rtf
Content-Type: text/rtf;
name="test.rtf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

{\rtf1\ansi\deff3\adeflang1025
... RTF file elided ...
This is only a test}
\par }
--Apple-Mail=_B94D16E3-387D-4897-88E8-40D79B80879C--


If I put text in the message body, then Message mode also sets
Content-Type to multipart/mixed, with the MIME boundaries, and the
attachment is recognized.

I don't know what the "correct" thing to do is, but at least it looks
like I'm able to work around this pretty easily!

Hope this is somehow, at some time, useful to someone.

Eric