Email is sent with no body content via SMTP on Mainframe

Question

SMTP MIME message has been working fine until couple of weeks. All of sudden body content of the email is blank and shows no data, Email is being sent but without body content in the email but subject line is apprpriate. Could someone let me know if it is related to internal support issue or something has been deprecated with SMTP utility. Appreciate your response.

Technical details follow: Utility IEBGENER is used to copy the emailing data to SMTP MIME server. Here is the JCL used:

//SENDEMAIL EXEC PGM=IEBGENER                            
//SYSIN    DD DUMMY                                      
//SYSUT1   DD DSN=EMAIL.INPUT.DS,DISP=SHR
//SYSUT2   DD SYSOUT=(B,SMTP)                            
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*                                  
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=* 
// 

The EMAIL.INPUT.DS contains

HELO IEFSSxx                                            
MAIL FROM:<MYTEST@TESTING.COM>                    
RCPT TO:<YOURTEST@TESTING.COM>                      
DATA                                                    
FROM:     MYTEST@TESTING.COM 
TO:       YOURTEST@TESTING.COM 
SUBJECT:  TEST MESSAGE FROM MVS USING SMTP              
MIME-VERSION: 1.0 
CONTENT-TYPE: TEXT/HTML;BOUNDARY="SIMPLE BOUNDARY"
--SIMPLE BOUNDARY
THIS IS A LINE IN THE BODY OF THE NOTE.                  
--SIMPLE BOUNDARY
.
QUIT

Answer 1

I suspect that your SMTP service was upgraded and may have become more sensitive to errors in setting up messages -- your example has a few...

The boundary subparameter of the Content-type parameter relates to multipart messages (it is the boundary delimiter between message parts). The Content-type of your message is not multipart so I imagine that "support" for the boundary subparameter may have been dropped yielding unpredictable results.

You may find it useful to review RFC 2045 and RFC 2046 which describe MIME format. The rules for the boundary subparameter are defined in RFC2046 under multipart messages.

Proper usage of the boundary delimiter in a multipart message generally requires that the boundary delimiter be followed by a blank line. Also, the last boundary delimiter, the one that terminates the last part of the message should have two hyphens appended to it.

Taking all this into consideration, a conforming message would look more like:

HELO IEFSSxx                                            
MAIL FROM:<MYTEST@TESTING.COM>                    
RCPT TO:<YOURTEST@TESTING.COM>                      
DATA                                                    
FROM:     MYTEST@TESTING.COM 
TO:       YOURTEST@TESTING.COM 
SUBJECT:  TEST MESSAGE FROM MVS USING SMTP 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="SIMPLE BOUNDARY"

--SIMPLE BOUNDARY

Please open the attachment, to solve your problems...
--SIMPLE BOUNDARY
Content-type: text/html

Try asking <a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com">Stackoverflow</a>
--SIMPLE BOUNDARY--
.
QUIT

Note that the blank lines in the above exampe are significant and that the last boundary delimiter has two trailing hypens.