Inbox fles and possible bug

[Scott Silva]

Miguel Koren OBrien de Lacy spake the following on 10/24/2006 12:03 PM:
> Gentlemen;
> 
> On one server I have Fedora Core 4 running with all the yum updates, Mail Scanner 
> 4.50.10-3 and Clam 0.88.4. This server has about 100 email accounts. Last month and 
> again today the same person complained about not being able to download emails using 
> Outlook configured to access pop accounts, but only on one of his accounts (the same 
> one both times). I checked a telnet to port 110 and found that dovecot reports that 
> the file can not be accessed. This file in /var/spool/mail was there so I checked to 
> permissions and size and all was well. I opened it up and noticed that it had a 
> blank line at the top of the file. So on a hunch I made a copy and removed the blank 
> line. After that everything worked again. This was the only mailbox file with a 
> blank line at the top out of a random sampling of mailbox files I looked at. This is 
> the first malbox "corruption" I have seen since I started using Linux in 1997, so 
> having 2 cases with the same account in a short period seems like something more 
> than coincidence.
> 
> My conclusion is that dovecot is particularly intolerant of the file format but also 
> that something is putting in the blank line. The blank line does not have space 
> charaters, just a line break. My prime suspect at the moment for doing this is 
> MailScanner because it works on the emails before final delivery. I think that this 
> user gets some type of email content that causes Mail Scanner to insert the spurious 
> character at the start of the header and that if this happens with the first email 
> received after the mailbox is emptied, the problem happens.
> 
> So the questions are if anybody has seens a similar problem and if my theory about a 
> subtle "bug" in MailScanner make sense?
> 
Mailscanner is not involved in this by the time the mail hits /var/spool/mail.
It is either your local delivery agent (maybe procmail), or a known issue with
Dovecot and Outlook. See

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Clients#head-603ef86194a337dc45305f89f8a1378dfcaa8146


-- 

MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!