I'm on a spam forwarding list* and the other day -- about a week ago
-- there was a message which came in from this list which would make
Procmail dump core. I'm afraid these core dumps had been happening for
a while before I noticed; I would start removing them but a new one
would appear, apparently as sendmail made a new attempt to deliver the
message to me. When I finally gave up and removed my .forward, it
seems that the message must already have been deleted from the queue
because I never received it (but had a healthy mess of mailing list
messages to clear up from my spool the next morning :-)
I ran gdb on the core dump on a Digital and it was able to tell me
that there had been a segmentation violation inside a (__valloc()
inside a) malloc() but that's it. (The mailhost is a similar machine
but logins are not allowed so it might not be running the same binary
I have here.) The Procmail version on that machine is 3.11pre4.
Running strings(1) on the core reveals an absolutely huge list of
recipients in the To: field.
What I'm wondering now is, is there something in Procmail itself that
is the matter or have I just been careless with my recipes? There are
not many backticks in my recipes but some other things which might be
affected by LINEBUF.
I'll mail the core (42k gzipped -- about half a meg when you unzip it
[it's full of "holes"]) and pertinent .rc files to anyone interested
enough to have a look. I'm no good at debugging myself. (Out of
curiosity, it would be interesting to know if it's possible to extract
the message out of the core, although I already downloaded it from the
spam mailing list's archive and had a look at it myself. It looks
somewhat malformed, BTW.)
/* era */
* contact majordomo(_at_)hiss(_dot_)han(_dot_)de about spam-list or check out
ftp://nutsy.han.de/pub/spam/spam-archive/
(the spam was sent by MWagner463(_at_)aol(_dot_)com on May 21 or 22)
--
Defin-i-t-e-ly. Sep-a-r-a-te. Gram-m-a-r. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/>
* Enjoy receiving spam? Register at <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam.html>