gabriel rosenkoetter on Fri, 14 Dec 2001 20:00:20 +0100


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Re: [Fwd: Re: [PLUG] radiance in linux]


On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 01:17:55PM -0500, Kevin Brosius wrote:
> Yes, it looks like the MTA on this end...  I never received anything
> beyond (or including) the 'From google' line.  So, it's common practice
> to add '>' in front of From if it appears at the beginning of a line in
> mail?  It looks like our MTA doesn't do that...

It, or something that's logically the same thing, is the only way to
deal with the mbox message-separation problem. (There are people who
will tell you that using a Content-Length: line solves this. It
doesn't, it just allows for messages to accidentally include too
much of the file rather than to accidentally include to little.)

The rest of your message is probably in your mail spool somewhere,
maybe delivered as a separate message (probably not caught by any
Procmail filters you're relying on). If the MTA actually broke when
the mail was outgoing, then it probably generated a postmaster email
(to a totally bogus adress; whatever the first word after From was
on that line), and your MTA's postmaster is (or, more likely, isn't)
dealing with the repercussions.

This munging of messages *might* not be necessary on systems that
store their mail spools in maildir rather than mbox format. I've
never tried doing that, as it's always sounded like a really good
way to run out if inodes on /var and break log rotation to me.
(Though, I suppose /var/mail could be made a separate partition...
then all you break is mail delivery. Woo hoo.)

What's the MTA? I'm pretty sure all of the commonly seen Unix MTAs
(Sendmail, Postfix, qmail) do insert the >.

It could also be that a MTA that's doing routing between
lists.phillylinux.org and you (but not between it and me) is losing
on the From issue.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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