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Re: [fetchmail] message delimiter found while scanning headers?

2003-10-12 21:08:00
On October 12, 2003 at 15:42, Scott Jacobsen wrote:

My yahoo email box is getting hit with emails containing the 
W32(_dot_)Swen(_dot_)A(_at_)mm
virus. My guess is this virus produces emails with mal-formed headers.
Fetchmail appears not to be able to download these mails. It
gives up leaving the legitimate messages on the yahoo server rather than
downloading them. Here's a log of the Fetchmail run. Any ideas?

I think there is something wrong with Yahoo's POP server.  I do
not know if it is related to the problem you are encountering, but
I have noticed that doing a TOP commend (e.g. "TOP # 0") on Swen
messages will sometimes return no header data (just an empty string).
This appears to be a recent behavior in the last few days.

I whipped up a Perl script to do some pre-filtering on my Yahoo
account to delete Swen messages since they flood my account and cause
my quota to get exceeded.  However, recently the filter appeared
to not be deleting some of the Swen messages like it used to.  After
some debugging, I found out that Yahoo's POP server was failing
to return headers of some of the viral messages.

I was able to confirm this with a manual telnet session to the server.
Therefore, I have now resorted to do the risking task of auto-deleting
messages over 140,000 bytes that returns blank header data from
the server.

This really pisses me off.  I sent a help request to Yahoo, but have
not heard from them yet (it has been two days).  If anyone has some
better contact info for Yahoo beyond their stupid help web form,
please pass it along.

--ewh

P.S.  I think Yahoo secretly likes things like Swen since it may
push people to buy larger mailboxes.

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