Re: [Exim] Escaping single dots before SMTP delivery

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Author: Matthew Byng-Maddick
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Escaping single dots before SMTP delivery
On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 04:38:48PM +0100, Simon Williams wrote:
> A search of the archives didn't give any hints on this one. I
> noticed that, when an email is sent with a single dot on a line on
> its own, not all of the message gets to its intended destionation (as
> the dot is used to denote the end of a message by an SMTP server).


The message as sent on the wire, or sent via stdin should be dot-escaped,
(unless you're using the -oi switch).

> I tested this with Mutt 1.5.4i using both Exim 4.12 & Sendmail
> 8.12.9. Sending using Sendmail to the Exim machine, the message gets
> through and appears unaltered (I haven't used tcpdump to determine
> how this is done yet). Sending from the Exim machine to the Sendmail
> machine, only the part before the single dot arrives at the
> destination.


What are you using to talk to exim, mutt again?

> I have looked through the ChangeLog & NewStuff files for Exim 4.14
> and couldn't see anything about this issue.
> The questions: Before I start looking into patching Exim or Mutt, is
> this functionality missing from Exim because you believe escaping the
> single dot should be done by the MUA or because no-one has yet sent
> in a patch?


Escaping the single dot should be done by the MUA, unless the -oi switch
is set. This behaviour is true with sendmail's /usr/sbin/sendmail interface
too.

> If this should be done by the MTA, do you think that the dot should
> be "escaped" by replacing it with two dots, prepending whitespace or
> something else?


If a line starts with a dot, you prepend another, what*EVER* comes after
it. (something which the participants in the very recent thread appeared
to be unaware of)

MBM

--
Matthew Byng-Maddick         <mbm@???>           http://colondot.net/