Mailing List Archive

header encoding issue causes qmail to choke
hello all,

I'm running net-qmail 1.06.

over the past few years I've seen situations where qmail will not process
emails where the "From" header contains special characters. I've been told
from a reliable source the the RFC's defining this (rfc2047 and rfc5322)
have been changed over time to include new encoding rules.

for instance an email containing the header:

From: "\"Firstname Lastname\"" <firstname.lastname@blah.foo.companyname.com>

(Note that is only one example, it seems that any "special" characters will
cause this)
will cause qmail to not process this email correctly and it remains in the
queue. Eventually if enough of these pile up (happening more frequently)
qmail will crash.

finding the offending emails in the queue and editing them as such...

From: "Firstname Lastname" <firstname.lastname@blah.foo.companyname.com>

then issueing a qmailctl flush command allows the email to process and
deliver just fine.

This is happening more and more lately, about once a week actually and I'd
like to know if there is any patch or solutions for this.

--

Thanks,

Jeff
Re: header encoding issue causes qmail to choke [ In reply to ]
On 8/2/2012 9:20 AM, Jeff McKeon wrote:
> From: "\"Firstname Lastname\"" <firstname.lastname@blah.foo.companyname.com>

Are you also running vpopmail? i've seen older (e.g., non-latest)
versions get upset with things like this. I'm not even sure qmail cares
what the from field says.

does /var/log/qmail/current indicate why the message is not delivered ?

--

Jeremy Kister
http://jeremy.kister.net./
Re: header encoding issue causes qmail to choke [ In reply to ]
Jeff McKeon <jeff.mckeon@ashcortechnologies.com> wrote:
>
> I'm running net-qmail 1.06.
[...]
> for instance an email containing the header:
>
> From: "\"Firstname Lastname\"" <firstname.lastname@blah.foo.companyname.com>
>
> (Note that is only one example, it seems that any "special" characters will
> cause this)
> will cause qmail to not process this email correctly and it remains in the
> queue. Eventually if enough of these pile up (happening more frequently)
> qmail will crash.

I think we're missing some information. If I send a message with the
above-formatted From: header qmail cleans it up (dequotes it) correctly,
queues, and delivers the message with no problems. This is true regardless of
whether I queue the message via SMTP or via qmail-inject directly. qmail
certainly doesn't crash for me.

Perhaps you're running some additional software/add-on/patch you haven't told
us about?

What is the envelope recipient address that qmail is trying to deliver the
problematic messages to? Show us the log lines for such a problematic message
getting queued and the delivery attempts which fail.

Charles
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