[fetchmail-devel] RE: [fetchmail]Help with warning: Illegal address syntax

[Rob <rob...@ho...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fet...@li... 
> [mailto:fet...@li...] On Behalf Of Gary Sims
> 
> Clearly the return-path is broken, it looks like the 
> Received: header has been 
> pasted on the end. I would guess a memory corruption 
> somewhere as the closing 
> ">" is missing which would imply something is being 
> overwritten by something else.
> 
> I agree, the question now remains, is it my ISP's mail server 
> which is broken 
> or is it fetchmail in its fetching of the mail by POP3.

Unlikely to be fetchmail (but not impossible).  The address is stored in a
buffer defined as being BUFSIZ characters long.  This is an OS define.  On my
Mandrake 9.1 box it's defined by stdio.h as being _IO_BUFSIZ.  That appears to
be defined by libio.h as _G_BUFSIZ which appears to be defined by _G_config.h
as 8192.  Even a very long email address should be less than 8191 bytes :)

It could be some bizarre bug (so I've CCd to the -devel list so that the
experts can have a look) that's causing a lack of truncation only for really
long addresses (or possibly ones where the terminating > is missing), but the
fact that you're the only person to report it (so far anyway) makes me suspect
a cause elsewhere.

One test might be to hack rfc822.c such that at each invocation of nxtaddr()
it sets all bytes in address[] to be NULL.  Of course, you'll need to get a
hold of a known broken email to test with :(
 
> IMHO, I don't actually agree. The mail message was on a POP3 
> server somewhere 
> which means it has gone through some sort of processing and 
> has arrived. The 
> local delivery failed and the NDN failed. In my opinion this 
> message should 
> be saved to disk and a notification sent to the postmaster. A 
> few years back 
> I worked on several email gateways including X.400 to SMTP 
> and our golden 
> rule was that no message should ever be lost. Worse case it 
> should be written 
> to disk for later examination. Just my opinion.

Actually, I agree.  What I'd like is that any broken message be forwarded as a
plain text attachment to the postmaster.  I agree with the line "Be liberal in
what you accept, and conservative in what you send".  Right now however
fetchmail simply drops broken email on the floor (or leaves it behind and
ignores it).


PLEASE - keep list traffic on the list.  Email sent directly to me may be
ignored utterly.

-- 
Rob | What part of "no" was it you didn't understand?