[Mailman-Users] Issues with replaced characters/newlines inmailmanlists

[Matt Emerson]

On Feb 3, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Matt Zorzin wrote:

> This is an exact copy and paste of an affected subject, with info
> obfuscated but of an identical length to the original information:
>
> Subject: [Suspect List XX] 1111111111-111111: Subject of emails  
> coming from
> 	mailing lists with "?" between words
>
> Our mail clients all run through AVG Enterprise antivirus.
>
> One interesting note is that it seems that many posts from this very
> list (mailman-users) are exhibiting the same symptoms; i'm getting the
> nonprintable characters in Mozilla, and a 'view source' shows a  
> newline
> in the subject.
>

We ran into a similar issue here.  It turned out that some virus- 
scanning MTA was incorrectly handling the folding of long headers.   
(Where "long" was greater than about 70 characters or so.)

You can try isolating the problem by connecting (via telnet) to the  
SMTP port of the various MTAs in the delivery path, and manually  
typing in messages with long header lines.

In our case:

A long test header:

Reply-to: "A very long real name.   
0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789"  
<0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789@ 
0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789.0 
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789>

After passing through the virus scanning system:

Reply-To: "A very long real name.   
01234567890123456789012345678901234567890  
12345678901234567890123456789"  
<0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012.345678901234567890123456789 
@01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456.78901234567890123456789 
. 
012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890.1234567890123456789>

Note the insertion of an extra space in the "real name" portion of  
the address, and the insertion of extra dots in the address portion.

Perhaps something similar is happening at your site.

-- 
Matt Emerson
rme at grc.nasa.gov