[H-GEN] Mail rejected due to bare linefeeds

[Stuart Longland]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Greg Black wrote:
| On 2004-08-10, Stuart Longland wrote:
|
|>	Lately, I've noticed a number of people have been getting problems
|>receiving any of my emails, and looking in the logs, I'm seeing a lot of
|>messages like the following:
|>
|>[...]
|>
|>I'm using QMail as the SMTP server
|
| [...]
|
| The message above doesn't mean anything.  It's just a software
| error message and we all know they have nothing much to do with
| reality.

Hrmm, servers which send messages that are straight plain wrong.  That
is, umm, helpful.

| What you need to do is a bit of observation.  Run tcpdump and
| see what's happening on the wire.  Network delays and timeouts
| can have weird effects, and they can occur anywhere along the
| path between the two SMTP hosts.

I managed to get a dump of what happens when I send to my yahoo address
(sjlongland(a)yahoo*com*au -- anti-spam measure: replace (a) and * with
appropriate symbols).  Oddly enough, I can send back and forth between
this address and my Yahoo one without any hassles whatsoever.

| However, whatever the problem, you can be sure that qmail won't
| send bare linefeeds unless you've patched it to do that.

At least I don't think it's patched that way.  I've looked at the Gentoo
ebuild, but there's no mention of such a patch.  Numerous security fixes
here and there, but nothing mentioning linefeeds.  I think my
installation is very much clean.

I'm currently going to see if I can register a couple of email addresses
on the offending servers and do some more trials, but in the meantime, I
think I'll also start harrassing the relevant helpdesks.

- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland -oOo- http://stuartl.longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Atomic Linux Project     -oOo-    http://atomicl.berlios.de |
| - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFBGzLMIGJk7gLSDPcRAh2RAJ9pn1vQq9a6fMczgsR2j+hVI+500QCeO+3C
47FQCk3B7MLmHB6A2SoE6/Q=
=BQJz
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----