Klaus Wacker <wacker(_at_)Physik(_dot_)Uni-Dortmund(_dot_)DE> writes:
On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, era eriksson wrote:
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 09:42:08 +0300 (EET DST)
From: era eriksson <era(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi>
To: procmail(_at_)Informatik(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
Subject: Re: spurious "from" - whose bug is it?
Resent-Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 08:47:06 +0200 (MET DST)
Resent-From: procmail(_at_)Informatik(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
[...]
*From* what I've seen while following the problems of the guy whose
Procmail digest would split always when the digest contained an
unquoted From_ line (hi Lance, how you going? :-), I am now under the
impression that this is not frequently done on outgoing mail. Instead,
it would seem that most sites (including my own) escape the From_
lines in the delivery phase.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about who should escape a leading
From_ in the message body. On the outgoing side, pine adds a '>',
elm doesn't, if I remember correctly. On the delivery side, sendmail
Pine should _not_ be doing this. This is definately a final-delivery
sort of munging, and to do it elsewhere just messes things up for those
of us whose mailboxes don't need it. For example, my .procmailrc
routes procmail list traffic to an MH folder. "From "'s don't need to
be escaped in MH folders because it's one message per file, and indeed,
three messages back in this thread I saw a 'naked' "From " at the
beginning of a line.
adds a '>', procmail v3.11pre3 doesn't always. From `man procmail':
sendmail escapes "From " if and only if you tell it to using a mailer
flag. In general, sendmail should be configured so that only the
*include* mailer does "From " escaping. "From " escaping for the local
mailer should be done by the mailer program itself (i.e., procmail).
If there is no Content-Length: field and procmail appends to
regular mailfolders, any lines in the body of the message
that look like postmarks are prepended with `>' (disarms
bogus mailheaders). The regular expression that is used to
search for these postmarks is:
`\nFrom '
That's strange. The manpages on my system have a slightly different
version of the above:
If there is no Content-Length: field or the -Y option has
been specified and procmail appends to regular mailfolders,
any lines in the body of the message that look like post-
marks are prepended with `>' (disarms bogus mailheaders).
The regular expression that is used to search for these
postmarks is:
`\nFrom '
If your MUAs don't understand Content-Length: headers, than procmail
should be invoked with the -Y flag. Note: the -Y flag only affectes
procmail's behavior when it's writing to regular mailfolders.
I have been seriously bitten by this. Somebody once sent me as
postmaster a message which contained a sample message (complete with
From_ header of course) from my site about which he complained. His MUA
(elm, IIRC) generated a Content-Length: field and didn't escape the
From_. My procmail saw the Content-Length: and didn't either. My pine
ignores Content-Length:, but it doesn't take just any for '^From '. As
far as I know, it requires a preceding empty line and something that
looks like an address and a date and nothing else on that line. But that
was of course the case. So I saw some rather confusing messages in my
incoming mail, which added to the confusion my mail system was in at
that time already.
Fix your invocation of procmail to have the -Y flag.
Philip Guenther