Sending Mail with file attahment as PDF

prabu.sivaram · New User Joined: 21 Feb 2011 Posts: 8 Location: Chennai

Hello Folks,

I am trying to find a way to send a mail to other user with file attachment as PDF.

Initially i decoded the PS file from EBCDIC to ASCII format and tried to send the same to user with IEBGENER utility.

Following is the Encoding used for PDF attachment.

CONTENT-TYPE: application/pdf; NAME="Batch_Stat.pdf"
CONTENT-TRANSFER-ENCODING: BINARY
CONTENT-DISPOSITION: ATTACHMENT

Finally i got the mail with file attachment as PDF..But if i open the file in adobe reader it is throwing a error as
"Adobe Couldn't open 'Batch_Stat.pdf' because it is not the supported file type or file damaged"

Please help me if i need to do anything before sending as attachment.

Robert Sample · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:24 pm

Merely specifying the attachment type as PDF does NOT make the text into a PDF file. Unless you have software on your mainframe that converts text files to PDF files, what you want to do cannot be done. You could read the 756-page specification for PDF files and write a program to run on your mainframe to convert a text file to a PDF, or you could convince your management to buy software from a vendor to do this, or you could realize that you cannot send a PDF file from the mainframe. One of these three WILL happen.

dick scherrer · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:26 pm

Hello,

Simply calling some data .PDF does not convert the data to a PDF - neither in EBCDIC nor ASCII.

If you want a file to be in PDF format, you must pass the data thru some process that does the conversion - then transmit that converted file (as a BINARY file).

vasanthz · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:30 pm

Hello,
How is the PDF file generated on mainframe? If the file is just a flat file(PS file) with TEXT in it, then you cannot send it as pdf

You would need a software which generates actual PDF file on mainframe(like SAS) and then you could send it across using the SMTP statements you have shown above.

If you open a .pdf file or .xls file using notepad you can find a lot of fuzzy data in it, this means that the are data crafted in specific format and not plain text.

Edit: Did not see top 2 posts when posting

parsesource · New User Joined: 06 Feb 2006 Posts: 97

The xmitip mail package also includes pdf support (using a free txt2pdf converter)

google for it - easy to find

prabu.sivaram · New User Joined: 21 Feb 2011 Posts: 8 Location: Chennai

Hi All,

Thanks for your support. I will look for ways to convert it into PDF format.

Will post you my findings once completed..