Broken mail?

[Julian Field]

Are you running Perl 5.8?
It looks like another occurrence of the problem discussed about 10 days
ago, for which I posted a patch on this list. My message subject was "Re:
Sys::Syslog Bug Report", dated 23/08/02.

If you apply that patch, this should be fixed.

Sorry I haven't had time to do a proper release of it, I've been rushed off
my feet having just added 1 staff member's entire job to my current load
(our Purchasing Manager is retiring).

At 12:28 03/09/2002, you wrote:
>Hello, has anyone come across this one.  An attachment someone is sending
>causes mailscanner to break, with this message:
>
>Out of memory during "large" request for 2147487744 bytes, total sbrk() is
>9665888 bytes at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris/Sys/Syslog.pm
>line 241.
>
>This blocks the queue processing and mail starts to build up.  Can anyone
>suggest (for the benefit of the sender) what it is about this Word
>attachment that causes this to happen?  The filename is:
>
>Content-Type: application/msword;
>   name="frank%20-%2079515jv.ptsb3%2072022002e.trad.doc"
>
>(For possible privacy reasons, I've changed some of the plain
>alphanumerics here to other plain alphanumerics).  It certainly looks odd,
>and the error is generated in the Syslog module, so it could be a message
>like this that is being generated and failing because of the oddness:
>
>Sep  3 12:24:02 khafre.cc.strath.ac.uk mailscanner[27623]: Found possible
>filename hiding in MVET_TOR.rtf.doc
>
>I'll suggest (when the queue dies down again!) renaming and resending to
>see if it is that document name.
>
>We're running quite an old version (with McAfee), so it's possible there
>will be some later changes in that module or elsewhere that will prevent
>this problem blocking the queue by now - I'll upgrade soon I promise!
>
>Jethro.
>
>. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>. . .
>Jethro R Binks                                   Computing Officer, IT
>Services
>Mailmaster, Listmaster, Webmaster,       University Of Strathclyde,
>Glasgow, UK
>Cachemaster
>jethro.binks at strath.ac.uk

--
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