Some emails received with empty attachment file but visible in SAPOffice

Question

Hi,
I hope someone can shed some light on this.  I couldn't find anything in OSS regarding this issue.  Our client suddenly started having a problem where emails sent out of the system containing .PDF attachments are being received sporadically as blank attachments.  This appears to be a performance issue and occurs randomly, typically in the middle of a batch of output being distributed by RSCONN01.
Oddly enough, when we display the SAPOffice email in SOST the next day, the attachment is there.  If we resend, the attachment comes through fine.  This only occurs in batch.
My instincts tell me this is occuring during the RFC call to MLUNXSND.  It's almost as if SENDMAIL is being triggered before the attachment is successfully written down to the unix level.
Our network is notoriously poor.  I have no idea to which directory the attachments get written before the email is sent.
Can anyone provide suggestions on where to look?  I'm thinking maybe a directory is full somewhere?  We've never archived anything.  This has been working successfully and without error for over 18 months now.  It just started happening a week or so ago.
My only other thought is that perhaps the commit to the database is not complete when generated by RSNAST00 prior to running RSCONN01.  Is it possible that SCOT is processing the outbound email before the attachment data is completely written to the database?  I would have thought that a commit work in RSNAST00 would prevent this?
Our basis group appears to be helpless and either unwilling or unable to research it further.  The fact that the output is fine in SAPOffice/SOST leads me to believe this is a problem at the UNIX level and is a basis issue, not an application issue.
Thanks so much for any suggestions on where to look for help to this problem.  We are on 4.6C

Answer 1

Is it possible that in batch mode perhaps multiple uuencode/sendmails are being called simultaneously and this is causing the problem where as when you run or test it manually you only invoke a single uuencode/sendmail at the unix level. (sendmail.cf)
You can test from 1 unix with something like this to send /tmp/report.pdf via email
uuencode /tmp/report.pdf report.pdf | mailx -s "test" ray[at]company.com
Perhaps try a batch of 10 of them at once from unix too
i=0;while [[ $i -lt 10 ]]
do
   uuencode /tmp/report.pdf report$.pdf | mailx -s "test $i" ray[at]company.com &
   let i="$i+1"
done
Alternatively perhaps your system is only allowed to make limited outbound SMTP connections by a firewall or mail gateway that's the next hop after Unix?