Unreadable multipart MIME messages

Stephen Lee splee at PLEXIO.COM
Thu Jan 10 19:04:06 GMT 2002


On Thu, 2002-01-10 at 10:17, Julian Field wrote:

> >2. My second issue concerns unparsible messages. I have received a
> >couple of messages looking somthing like this:
> >
> >The following e-mail messages were found to have viruses in them:
> >
> >    Sender: <user at abc.com>
> >Recipient: userx at efg.com
> >   Subject:
> >MessageID: 16Oaa0-0003o3-00
> >    Report: Could not parse message 16Oaa0-0003o3-00
> >--
> >MailScanner
> >Email Virus Scanner
> >
> >They are multipart MIME messages containing text, html and a word
> >document and is generated in Outlook Express. The mail are coming from
> >legit senders. From the report sent by MailScanner to the postmaster, I
> >am guessing it can't parse and disect the multipart MIME components. If
> >there was a virus in the Word document, wouldn't that generate a
> >different message?
>
> It is a problem caused by certain versions of Outlook (and Outlook Express)
> generating "Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format" messages that the TNEF
> decoder can't cope with.
>
> You have a few choices: either get your users to use HTML for pretty
> messages instead of Microsoft's proprietary "Outlook Rich Text Format"
> (which only other copies of Outlook can read anyway), or you can make
> MailScanner "Deliver Unparsable Messages" (there's an option in the
> Advanced section at the bottom of mailscanner.conf to set this). Of course
> setting this option means that viruses in unparsable messages cannot be
> detected, but it will mean that no mail gets bounced for this reason.
> --

Thanks. It turns out that tnef was poining to tnef.solaris instead of
tnef.linux but even with that fixed and mailscanner restarted I still
get the unparsable bounces. This happens with any message containing
mime attachments. F-prot produces a no virus found message but
MailScanner still quarantines it. Could I have misconfigured some perl
modules:

MIME-tools   5.411
Mail   1.14
File::Spec    0.82
MIME::Lite  2.117
MIME::Base64   2.12
IO-stringy 2.108
MD5  2.02
Digest::MD5  2.16
Net::SSLeay 1.07

Thanks,
Stephen



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