Re: [exim] Iconv

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Author: Ron McKeating
Date:  
To: Alan J. Flavell
CC: Exim-Users \(E-mail\)
Subject: Re: [exim] Iconv
On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 11:36 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Ron McKeating wrote:
>
> > OK have done a little more investigation.
> >
> > An email came in for a user with the following headers
> >
> > From: =?GB2312?B?0e7PyMn6?= <szyang8@???>
>
> So it's base64-encoded, and the character encoding ("charset" in MIME
> terminology, sorry to be pedantic) was GB2312, (which I understand to
> be mainland simplified Chinese - not that this affects the issue
> much).
>
> Decoding the base64 encoding indeed produces the byte-sequence which
> you reported. And the incoming header, as far as I can tell, was
> protocol-correct.
>
> > The vacation script automatically replies to say this bod is on hols.
> > The log entry is
> >
> > 2005-09-30 00:29:23 1EL7q6-0000sg-Sw => >ÑîÏÈÉú <szyang8@???>
> > <adpgt@???> R=vacation T=address_reply
>
> As you see, those raw bytes have been written to the log. You're then
> pasting them into your mail to this list, that's advertised as
> iso-8859-1, resulting in the unreadable sequence of accented Latin-1
> characters that I (and presumably most of the rest of us) are seeing.
>
> (We don't get to see what was actually included in the header of the
> vacation reply, so I'm keeping an open mind on that. If it's
> protocol correct, it'll also be base-64-encoded like the incoming
> header.)
>

Well the header I put in above is the header for the vacation reply, and
what you see there is how it appeared in the log when viewed with
exigrep and vi. Vacation messages do not go into sent-items so I cannot
get the original outgoing message. So the characters you see were cut
and pasted from vi, all we know is that is how vi represented them. They
havn't changed since posting to the list though.

Tom Kistner has said he may take at look at his exilog package to see if
there is anyway to stop this from breaking exilog. Lets see how that
goes.

Ron


> > So, is this what exim is supposed to do,
>
> I'm afraid that's where my contribution ends, right at this minute.
> The key seems to be T=address_reply in one's configuration. Ours
> calls driver = autoreply - I presume yours does so too.
>
> > This latter entry breaks exilog, which is why we discovered it.
>
> Oh.
>
> I'm personally interested in character code issues (as my web pages
> doubtless reveal), so if no-one comes up with an answer I'll try to
> find a moment myself to look at this.
>
>

--
Ron McKeating
Senior IT Services Specialist
Computing Services
Loughborough University
01509 222329