NULL characters in message

[Jeff A. Earickson]

This is pretty much OT for mailscanner, but I run UW IMAP, Qualcomm
POP, mail/mailscanner etc on Sun boxes.  People will invoke POP and
IMAP (via HORDE/imp) simultaneously and munge up their mailboxes to the
point where pine and imp choke on opening the mailbox.  Same problem
that you describe with null chars.

Anyway, my trick is this: invoke mailx on an HP-UX system and open the
mailbox.  Then do "w" and "q" to save the mailbox.  HP's version of
mailx will complain about NULL chars and strip them out, thus "fixing"
the corrupted mailbox 99% of the time.  Sun's version of mailx won't do
this trick.  This only works if you have an HP-UX box with access to the
/var/mail directory.  Or maybe write a perl script to strip NULLs.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Jim Dickenson wrote:

> Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 08:43:34 -0700
> From: Jim Dickenson <dickenson at CFMC.COM>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: NULL characters in message
>
> One of my co-workers is having problems with Microsoft Outlook 2003 getting
> email from our POP3 server. It seems that if there is a message with a NULL
> character in it Outlook refuses to pick up the message, or any message after
> the problem message. He needs to use our web mail interface to delete the
> message. He can then get the rest of his messages via Outlook.
>
> Are others having this problem?
>
> Can someone offer a rule that I can put somewhere, either in MailScanner or
> SpamAssassin, to raise the Spam score of email with a NULL character in the
> body of the message?
>
> My mail server is running Red Hat Linux 9.0, with all patches, SA 2.6.3,
> MailScanner 4.31.6-1, Sendmail 8.12.8 and version 2001a of the POP server
> from http://www.washington.edu/imap/.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Jim Dickenson
>
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