[7383] in SIPB bug reports
setting sender in Pine fails catastrophically with new mailhub
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Thu Oct 7 04:17:48 1999
Message-Id: <199910070816.EAA08800@speaker-for-the-dead.mit.edu>
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: bug-dialup@MIT.EDU, postmaster@MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
Cc: mark@MIT.EDU, tom@MIT.EDU, kretch@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 04:16:59 -0400
While trying to clean up after the recently discovered problem sending
mail form "local" users on some 8.2 machines, Mark noticed a weird
bounce from a dialup. In an attempt to determine whether there was a
large scale problem on the dialups I set about trying to reproduce it.
I succeeded in doing so, once I realized that the user was using pine
as his MUA.
It turns out that if you set "user-domain" in the config file, pine
uses that to set the envelope from (mh, emacs, and rmail all seem to
just set the from in the body of the message.) At this point,
outgoing bounces it, and pine (or is it sendmail?) doesn't seem to try
to reset the envelope from before sending the bounce, so it bounces,
and unsurprisingly the doublebounce bounces too, and sendmail bails
and dumps the mail in /var/tmp/dead.letter. (A silent failure from
the user standpoint). A copy of the headers and bounce message are
included below.
I've only found one user who lost on the dialups. I will be
forewarding him his bounce messages from dead.letter, and removing the
dead.letter files from the two dialups where they were created. I
alos plan to give him a short explanation of how he lost and tell him
to contact bug-sipb if he wants more info.
Also, is there any way we can detect people running into this problem
on cluster machines and let them know their mail was silently dropped.
Either by looking at the logs on outgoing, or just putting up some
sort of warning when they start pine?
bug-sipb: I *think* this is mostly pine's fault, can anythign be done?
postmaster: Being unable to set the envelope from is a new limitation
that you may want to publicize. This is the second instance I've seen
where someone got cauget by it, though in the first, the user actually
saw that they were losing. (I don't know what the MUA was in that
case.
Jonathon
Here is an example set of headers:
Oct 7 03:31:16 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8041]: DAA08041: from=<opuser@cyberspace.org>, size=330, class=0, pri=30330, nrcpts=1, msgid=<Pine.GSO.3.96L.991007033103.7365D-100000@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>, proto=SMTP, relay=opuser@localhost
Oct 7 03:31:16 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAA08041: to=<jweiss@cyberspace.org>, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=smtp, relay=melbourne-city-street.mit.edu. [18.69.0.45], stat=Data format error
Oct 7 03:31:17 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAA08041: DAA08043: DSN: Data format error
Oct 7 03:31:17 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAA08043: to=<opuser@cyberspace.org>, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=smtp, relay=melbourne-city-street.mit.edu., stat=Data format error
Oct 7 03:31:17 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAA08043: DAB08043: return to sender: Data format error
Oct 7 03:31:17 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAB08043: to=postmaster, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=smtp, relay=melbourne-city-street.mit.edu., stat=Data format error
Oct 7 03:31:17 buzzword-bingo.mit.edu sendmail[8043]: DAA08043: Saved message in /usr/tmp/dead.letter
Here is the bounce message (copied from dead.letter):
From MAILER-DAEMON Thu Oct 7 03:31:17 1999
Return-Path: <MAILER-DAEMON>
Received: from localhost (localhost) by buzzword-bingo.mit.edu (8.9.3) with internal
id DAA08043; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 03:31:17 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 03:31:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
Subject: Returned mail: Data format error
Message-Id: <199910070731.DAA08043@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
To: <opuser@cyberspace.org>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
The original message was received at Thu, 7 Oct 1999 03:31:16 -0400 (EDT)
from opuser@localhost
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<jweiss@cyberspace.org>
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to melbourne-city-street.mit.edu.:
>>> MAIL From:<opuser@cyberspace.org> SIZE=73
<<< 553 <opuser@cyberspace.org>... Config error.See http://mit.edu/network/mail-error.html
501 <jweiss@cyberspace.org>... Data format error
----- Original message follows -----
Return-Path: <opuser@cyberspace.org>
Received: from localhost (opuser@localhost) by buzzword-bingo.mit.edu (8.9.3) with SMTP
id DAA08041; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 03:31:16 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 03:31:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Athena Operations <opuser@cyberspace.org>
X-Sender: opuser@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@cyberspace.org>
Subject: jj
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96L.991007033103.7365D-100000@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
kk
