Malformed attachments from MailScanner?

Julian Field jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sat Apr 20 11:04:28 IST 2002


Are you running the latest MIME-tools? I haven't seen this happen myself.

At 18:17 19/04/2002, you wrote:
>I'm noticing a problem with some messages that have had attachments
>removed by MailScanner. It appears that sometimes a bogus blank line is
>being created after a MIME boundary. This is especially common with
>messages containing the Klez virus (maybe triggered by two consecutive
>boundary lines in the source message?). Viewing the source of such a
>message after MailScanner processing, I see something like this this:
>
>----------------------
>...
>At Mon Apr 15 18:04:46 2002 the virus scanner said:
>    >>> Virus 'W32/Klez-E' found in file ./SAA24934/Aqq.exe
>
>Note to Help Desk: Look on the MailScanner in
>/var/spool/MailScanner/quaran=
>tine (message SAA24934).
>
>--F5tQ38jj004znQ
>
>Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
>         name=MSOE.TXT
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
>Content-ID: <Wi1Ny441h56355a>
>
>ICAgIC0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0t
>LS0tLS0tLS0tLQ0KICAgICAgICBM6WFtZSBkZSBNaWNyb3NvZnQgT3V0bG9vayhUTSkgRXhw
>...
>----------------------
>
>Note the blank line after "--F5tQ38jj004znQ".
>
>Email clients will then not process the headers of that Part, and
>instead typically treat them as the beginning of a plain text
>attachment. In a multipart/alternative message, this undecoded gibberish
>may be the *only* Part of the message thing that some mail clients will
>display. Such a message is sure to be very confusing to most end users.
>
>Am I the only one who has this problem? Can anyone suggest anything that
>might improve the situation? (I'm using MailScanner 3.13-2 and
>MIME-tools 5.411.)
>
>--
>Jason Summers

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ



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