A (the?) MIME digest / MTA problem
There exists a problem with MIME digests of b4 and some MTAs. Something in some digests makes the receiving end to think that it has received the whole message, while the sending MTA (mine was sendmail 8.8.5, now 8.9.1) thinks it failed and leaves the message to the spool. The message needs to be removed manually, for otherwise the poor subscriber will get a copy of it every time the mail queue is run, indefinitely.
Does anybody know a remedy? I'm leaving for a holiday soon, and wouldn't like to write a script to be able to delete digests through my mobile phone...
A maybe-related problem is that some messages are left to the mail spool even if they are expired. Apparently his has only happened with mailman, not with majordomo. (I just deleted a few thousands, the oldest dated May 1998.) Sounds like a sendmail problem, but I don't understand how it's related to mailman.
Odd. I can't think of anything I know of that would give that sort of behavior. Can you look at one of these digests and see if there is anything suspect about them??
John
On Sat, Jul 11, 1998 at 02:05:53AM +0300, Janne Sinkkonen wrote:
There exists a problem with MIME digests of b4 and some MTAs. Something in some digests makes the receiving end to think that it has received the whole message, while the sending MTA (mine was sendmail 8.8.5, now 8.9.1) thinks it failed and leaves the message to the spool. The message needs to be removed manually, for otherwise the poor subscriber will get a copy of it every time the mail queue is run, indefinitely.
Does anybody know a remedy? I'm leaving for a holiday soon, and wouldn't like to write a script to be able to delete digests through my mobile phone...
A maybe-related problem is that some messages are left to the mail spool even if they are expired. Apparently his has only happened with mailman, not with majordomo. (I just deleted a few thousands, the oldest dated May 1998.) Sounds like a sendmail problem, but I don't understand how it's related to mailman.
-- Janne
Mailman-Developers maillist - Mailman-Developers@python.org http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
On 11 Jul 1998, Janne Sinkkonen wrote:
There exists a problem with MIME digests of b4 and some MTAs. Something in some digests makes the receiving end to think that it has received the whole message, while the sending MTA (mine was sendmail 8.8.5, now 8.9.1) thinks it failed and leaves the message to the spool. The message needs to be removed manually, for otherwise the poor subscriber will get a copy of it every time the mail queue is run, indefinitely.
This is a bug in sendmail, it segfaults on 8bitmime digests when sending them to hosts which don't support 8bitmime. I already wrote about this to the list a couple of weeks ago. Btw i thought 8.9.1 already has it fixed.
Greg
-- Madarasz Gergely gorgo@caesar.elte.hu gorgo@linux.rulez.org It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry. Egy pingvinre gyakorlatilag lehetetlen haragosan nezni. HuLUG: http://www.cab.u-szeged.hu/local/linux/
On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Gergely Madarasz wrote:
On 11 Jul 1998, Janne Sinkkonen wrote:
There exists a problem with MIME digests of b4 and some MTAs. Something in some digests makes the receiving end to think that it has received the whole message, while the sending MTA (mine was sendmail 8.8.5, now 8.9.1) thinks it failed and leaves the message to the spool. The message needs to be removed manually, for otherwise the poor subscriber will get a copy of it every time the mail queue is run, indefinitely.
This is a bug in sendmail, it segfaults on 8bitmime digests when sending them to hosts which don't support 8bitmime. I already wrote about this to the list a couple of weeks ago. Btw i thought 8.9.1 already has it fixed.
I also suspect that the sendmail problem is causing this particular behavior - check your mqeue for sendmail core dumps to confirm.
I'm running sendmail 8.9.0 on python.org as of recently, and had to apply the patch that gergely sent me (thanks again, gergely) to get around the problem. I'm posting it here, for anyone that's interested and for the maillist archive. I think i'll include it and a note about it in the mailman distribution.
Of course, this patch doesn't help the recipient sites running sendmail 8.8.x and 8.9.x (for some x'es). Question is, does anyone think we should we be constraining the digester to 7-bit mime messages - presumably stripping the 8th bit from messages that have it - just for the sake of a current bug in the most prominent MTA? I'd be loathe to do that, thinking that the bug should be exposed and get fixed.
Ken
*** collect.c.orig Wed May 20 02:36:05 1998 --- collect.c Thu May 28 13:29:09 1998
*** 353,360 **** if (*--bp != '\n' || *--bp != '\r') bp++; *bp = '\0'; ! if (bitset(H_EOH, chompheader(buf, FALSE, hdrp, e))) ! mstate = MS_BODY; break;
case MS_BODY:
--- 353,364 ---- if (*--bp != '\n' || *--bp != '\r') bp++; *bp = '\0'; ! if (bitset(H_EOH, chompheader(buf, FALSE, hdrp, e))) { ! mstate = MS_BODY; ! if (tTd(30, 35)) ! printf("H_EOH, istate=%d, mstate=%d\n", istate, mstate); ! goto nextstate; ! } break;
case MS_BODY:
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:
Of course, this patch doesn't help the recipient sites running sendmail 8.8.x and 8.9.x (for some x'es). Question is, does anyone think we
It causes segfault only when sendmail tries to convert it from 8bit to 7bit. So the problem could be only at recipients whose secondary MX is sendmail, the primary does not know 8bitmime, and the primary can't be reached for a while.
should we be constraining the digester to 7-bit mime messages - presumably stripping the 8th bit from messages that have it - just for the sake of a current bug in the most prominent MTA? I'd be loathe to
That would not be a solution... just think of all non-english mailing lists.
I just remembered something else about the digests... could it be possible to strip the non-essential headers from the plaintext digest ? I got lots of complaints about them since I switched from majordomo. The From: header, and the Subject: could be enough....
Greg
-- Madarasz Gergely gorgo@caesar.elte.hu gorgo@linux.rulez.org It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry. Egy pingvinre gyakorlatilag lehetetlen haragosan nezni. HuLUG: http://www.cab.u-szeged.hu/local/linux/
On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Gergely Madarasz wrote:
I just remembered something else about the digests... could it be possible to strip the non-essential headers from the plaintext digest ? I got lots of complaints about them since I switched from majordomo. The From: header, and the Subject: could be enough....
This one is one my list - i've heard this complaint from several people.
Ken
Was it not originally this way?? When/why did it change?
John
On Fri, Jul 10, 1998 at 07:47:02PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote:
On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Gergely Madarasz wrote:
I just remembered something else about the digests... could it be possible to strip the non-essential headers from the plaintext digest ? I got lots of complaints about them since I switched from majordomo. The From: header, and the Subject: could be enough....
This one is one my list - i've heard this complaint from several people.
Ken
Mailman-Developers maillist - Mailman-Developers@python.org http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, John Viega wrote:
Was it not originally this way?? When/why did it change?
My fault - i added in more to the headers, missing the info myself, and thinking that good MIME mua's could manage the display nicely. Oh well, i think i'll just cut them back a lot - though probably not completely...
Ken
Wasn't the request for on non-MIME digests? I don't mind so much w/ MIME. Also, if we reorganize a few things to avoid filtering for each message (by caching stuff), it would be acceptable to let the user set verbose headers as an option.
On Fri, Jul 10, 1998 at 08:00:44PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, John Viega wrote:
Was it not originally this way?? When/why did it change?
My fault - i added in more to the headers, missing the info myself, and thinking that good MIME mua's could manage the display nicely. Oh well, i think i'll just cut them back a lot - though probably not completely...
Ken
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, John Viega wrote:
Wasn't the request for on non-MIME digests? I don't mind so much w/ MIME. Also, if we reorganize a few things to avoid filtering for each message (by caching stuff), it would be acceptable to let the user set verbose headers as an option.
The reason i was considering reducing the headers in both is because currently they're congruent - the same file contains them both. I don't think i'll have time to refine that very much, because there's higher priority stuff to tackle. We'll see though - eventually, messages pending digest should be stored in some kind of catalogue, enabling more discretion in their handling...
Ken
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, John Viega wrote:
Wasn't the request for on non-MIME digests? I don't mind so much w/ MIME. Also, if we reorganize a few things to avoid filtering for each message (by caching stuff), it would be acceptable to let the user set verbose headers as an option.
The reason i was considering reducing the headers in both is because currently they're congruent - the same file contains them both.
I see... but I think it is nice to have the headers in the mime digest - it keeps the mails full, with content information, etc. The best solution would be to filter out the extra headers at digest-creation time and only when creating the plaintext digest.
Greg
-- Madarasz Gergely gorgo@caesar.elte.hu gorgo@linux.rulez.org It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry. Egy pingvinre gyakorlatilag lehetetlen haragosan nezni. HuLUG: http://www.cab.u-szeged.hu/local/linux/
On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Gergely Madarasz wrote:
I see... but I think it is nice to have the headers in the mime digest - it keeps the mails full, with content information, etc. The best solution would be to filter out the extra headers at digest-creation time and only when creating the plaintext digest.
That's very likely what i'll do - if you look in mm_digest.py, there's 'present'ation method which can do all the reduction work, shouldn't be hard.
Ken
On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Gergely Madarasz wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:
It causes segfault only when sendmail tries to convert it from 8bit to 7bit. So the problem could be only at recipients whose secondary MX is sendmail, the primary does not know 8bitmime, and the primary can't be reached for a while.
Ah! That sort of thing would help explain why i've so rarely heard about problems from recipients. And it would explain why the problem would show at the mailman site - they communicate with many sites, some of which may well have the 7bit restriction.
Ken
One more thing re the sendmail problem - if it still does exist in 8.9.1, some of us should write sendmail.org and complain. Considering that it's a known and disruptive bug (they had it in the known-bugs list for 8.9.0), it should have been stomped!
Ken
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:
One more thing re the sendmail problem - if it still does exist in 8.9.1, some of us should write sendmail.org and complain. Considering that it's a known and disruptive bug (they had it in the known-bugs list for 8.9.0), it should have been stomped!
The changelog for 8.9.1 says it is fixed.
Greg
-- Madarasz Gergely gorgo@caesar.elte.hu gorgo@linux.rulez.org It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry. Egy pingvinre gyakorlatilag lehetetlen haragosan nezni. HuLUG: http://www.cab.u-szeged.hu/local/linux/
participants (4)
-
Gergely Madarasz -
Janne Sinkkonen -
John Viega -
Ken Manheimer