On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> I just received the following Email from exim 2.054:
> 552 Header line is ridiculously overlong
That message relates to a header line that is more than 8192 bytes long.
Exim treats that as a total disaster and (in the case of SMTP input)
returns a 552 error to the sender.
> >From my log file I can't analyze where the email came from, it seems
> it was really silently skipped:
Hmm. I suppose it really should log something; this was implemented
a long time ago purely as a paranoia check against some host going mad
and sending an infinite number of characters in a header line. I will
make it log something.
> What possibilities do I have to at least recover such emails?
> Increasing HEADER_MAXLENGTH isn't a real solution. I'd prefer to get
> the mail appended to the error email but not skipped and thrown away
> since I don't have a chance to recover it.
You can't recover them, because Exim has refused to accept them from the
remote host. The error email you refer to happened because you were
using -bS, that is, this was batch SMTP input rather than true SMTP, so
it sent the 552 error in an error message, but in both cases the broken
message itself has not been saved anywhere by Exim. This is the same
action as happens for any SMTP error during batch SMTP (or other errors,
such as "message too big").
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
