Re: [EXIM] Exim (rmail) handling malformed addresses

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Autor: Philip Hazel
Data:  
A: Stephen Marquard
CC: exim-users
Assumpte: Re: [EXIM] Exim (rmail) handling malformed addresses
On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Stephen Marquard wrote:

> We are running Taylor UUCP on FreeBSD, and have lots of UUCP sites.
>
> Often enough, UUCP users will try to send email to send email to
> malformed addresses, typically with trailing or leading "."s in the
> domain name, or mismatched <>s, eg.
>
>    user@???.


Set strip_trailing_dot if you want to accept these. There is also
strip_excess_angle_brackets, which removes duplicate (though not
mismatched) <>s.

> When one of the messages gets to rmail, exim appears to fail it and
> return a non-zero exit code, so that Taylor UUXQT mails an error
> message to the system uucp account, eg.
>
>    To: uucp@???
>    Subject: UUCP execution files saved after failure
>    Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 16:01:51 +0200

>
>    Message from UUCP on picasso Fri Jan  9 16:01:51 1998

>
>    A UUCP execution request failed:
>        rmail a@???.
>    (...)

>
> But then exim also bounces the message, also (unusefully) to the uucp
> system account, eg.


Well, Exim isn't to know that whatever called it is going to generate a
bounce, so it does its own error thing. You can vary what it does by
setting -oee, in which case it will exit with a zero exit code after
sending its error message. Or you can set -oep which writes the error to
stderr instead of sending a message.

As for sending the message to the system account, I guess that you are
actually doing something like

rmail a@???.

with the actual sender of the message in the UUCP "From " line at the
start of the message. Unfortunately, Exim hasn't got that far when it
detects the syntax error in the recipient address. Now, if you'd
arranged for it to be called as

rmail -f sender a.x.y.z

then it would have decoded the sender address first.

Philip

-- 
Philip Hazel                   University Computing Service,
ph10@???             New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@???          England.  Phone: +44 1223 334714



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