[Esd-l] Worms "caught" in mailboxes

Brett Glass brett at lariat.org
Mon Apr 12 10:37:50 PDT 2004


A client of mine is using John's sanitizer and is running into a frequent 
problem. Every now and then, he can't retrieve his mail from the server; 
the POP server software says that it can't parse the mail file. When he 
opens the mail file in a text editor, he discovers that a worm has 
arrived in his box. The sanitizer has chopped off the usual RFC822 
headers, but has left the MIME attachments behind. Because the file 
doesn't begin with a line that starts with "From", the POP server is 
declaring the mailbox to be invalid and not allowing retrieval of the 
message. Cutting out everything up to the first line beginning with 
"From" solves the problem.

Is this a bug in the sanitizer? In Procmail? The system is running 
FreeBSD 4.9 and a recent version of Procmail; the sanitizer is version 1.138.

--Brett Glass


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