MS 4.78.15 vs 4.78.9: TNEF fix, yippee!

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Julian,

I got in the complaint of a MailScanner failure below for version
4.78.9:

    -----Original Message-----
    From: MailScanner [mailto:postmaster at colby.edu]
    Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 12:48 PM
    To: jtortor at colby.edu
    Subject: Warning: E-mail error detected

    Our virus detector failed to completely analyse a message you sent:-
      To: info at americanawardsinc.com
      Subject: did you get it?
      Date: Tue Sep  1 12:47:59 2009
    Any parts of the message that could not be analysed will not have been
    delivered.

    If you are using Microsoft Outlook, we strongly recommend you change your
    outgoing message format from "Rich Text" to "HTML" or "Plain Text".

    1) Click on the "Tools" menu and choose "Options..."
    2) Go to the "Mail Format" tab
    3) For message format, select "HTML" or "Plain text"
    4) Click OK

    The virus detector said this about the message:
    Report: Report: MailScanner: killedmailscanner


    --
    MailScanner
    Email Virus Scanner
    Colby College Information Technology Services
    www.colby.edu/administration_cs/its

    For all your IT requirements visit: http://www.transtec.co.uk

Looking in the system logs for this I found:

Sep  1 12:28:44 jasper MailScanner[3865]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Expanding TNEF archive at /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming/3865/n81GShWn007050/winmail.dat
Sep  1 12:28:44 jasper MailScanner[3865]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 added TNEF contents timage003.jpg
Sep  1 12:28:44 jasper MailScanner[3865]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 has had TNEF winmail.dat removed
Sep  1 12:33:05 jasper MailScanner[15474]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Making attempt 2 at processing message n81GShWn007050
Sep  1 12:33:05 jasper MailScanner[15474]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Expanding TNEF archive at /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming/15474/n81GShWn007050/winmail.dat
Sep  1 12:33:05 jasper MailScanner[15474]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 added TNEF contents timage003.jpg
Sep  1 12:33:05 jasper MailScanner[15474]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 has had TNEF winmail.dat removed
Sep  1 12:38:39 jasper MailScanner[26970]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Making attempt 3 at processing message n81GShWn007050
Sep  1 12:38:39 jasper MailScanner[26970]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Expanding TNEF archive at /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming/26970/n81GShWn007050/winmail.dat
Sep  1 12:38:39 jasper MailScanner[26970]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 added TNEF contents timage003.jpg
Sep  1 12:38:39 jasper MailScanner[26970]: [ID 702911 mail.info] Message n81GShWn007050 has had TNEF winmail.dat removed
(etc)
Sep  1 12:47:59 jasper MailScanner[11155]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] Warning: skipping message n81GShWn007050 as it has been attempted too many times
Sep  1 12:47:59 jasper MailScanner[11155]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] Quarantined message n81GShWn007050 as it caused MailScanner to crash several times
Sep  1 12:47:59 jasper MailScanner[11155]: [ID 702911 mail.notice] Saved entire message to /var/spool/MailScanner/quarantine/20090901/n81GShWn007050


So I upgraded to 4.78.15 (remembering the blurbs about TNEF issues recently),
and things worked when this person resent their message.  My TNEF settings:

Expand TNEF = yes
Use TNEF Contents = replace
Deliver Unparsable TNEF = no
TNEF Expander = /opt/MailScanner/bin/tnef --maxsize=100000000
TNEF Timeout = 120

My setup: Solaris 10.

So, thank you, your TNEF work on 4.78 has helped a lonely Sun user.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College