using uuencode for email attachments

[Christopher Allen]

I have written a program generate & send emails from our data base direct to 
our customers.
A typically email uses MIME protocols for an HTML body followed by a pdf file 
attached.

Only some addressees can open the attached pdf.  Many of them get an error when 
the try to open the pdf.
It looks like success or otherwise depends on the domain that receives the 
email. For example, address@hidden<mailto:address@hidden> can open the pdf, but 
address@hidden<mailto:address@hidden> cannot.
The text of the error depends on the platform trying open it, but they have 
common theme implying some corruption in the attachment
We also have same trouble with spreadsheets.

My program is written in UNIBASIC .  The code

*         writes the HTML body of the email to an ASCII file

*         uses a shell command  uuencode to append a encoded copy of the pdf 
file (& appropriate MIME messages) to the end of the email message.
There are no libraries to handle this.

We do all this on
Hardware         : IBM Power4
Operating system : RedHat LINUX
O.S. version     : 3.0 Enterprise
UniData version  : 8.2.2

$ uuencode -v
uuencode (GNU sharutils) 4.13.3
Copyright (C) 1994-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc., all rights reserved.
This is free software. It is licensed for use, modification and
redistribution under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, version 3 or later
    <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>


please send bug reports to:  address@hidden

Can you advise the best solution?

Chris Allen
Programmer

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