ZendMail and Amazon's Kindle Converter

If you’re trying to use Zend_Mail to send email to Amazon’s free PDF-to-Kindle converter, you might like to know that for some reason two headers that Zend_Mail adds to the message—Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Disposition—trick Amazon’s converter into thinking that there are no attachments. (These emails are interpreted correctly by pretty much everything else as far as I can tell so I’m not sure if this is Zend_Mail’s fault, or Amazon’s, or both.)

There’s probably several ways to fix this, but I fixed it by creating a new version of Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp:

class Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp_Kindle extends Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp
{
    protected function _prepareHeaders($headers)
    {
        // Remove some headers from the mail enclosure--these somehow confuse
        // Amazon's Kindle converter, leading it to conclude that there are
        // no attachments.  (Even though every other mail client seems to be
        // able to cope.)

        if (array_key_exists("Content-Transfer-Encoding", $headers)) {
            unset($headers["Content-Transfer-Encoding"]);
        }
        if (array_key_exists("Content-Disposition", $headers)) {
            unset($headers["Content-Disposition"]);
        }

        return parent::_prepareHeaders($headers);
    }
}

Anyway, with this “bug” worked around, I can now do this:

My ~/Library/PDF Services/Send to Kindle reads:

#!/bin/bash

TITLE=$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape(join(" ", @ARGV))' $1)

cat "$3" | curl --data-binary @- "http://beebo.org/api/kindle/?username=ithinkihaveacat&title=$TITLE"

(See “Providing PDF Workflow Options in the Print Dialog” for more information.)