[imp] imp or cyrus bug/misconfiguration

[Joseph Brennan]

--On Friday, November 12, 2004 6:48 AM -0400 Patrick Boutilier 
<boutilpj at ednet.ns.ca> wrote:

> alois blasbichler wrote:
>> hello list
>>
>> i have the following problem :
>>
>> When i send with IMP an e-mail for about 40 recipients the e-mails seems
>> to be sent correctly. I see this mail under my sent-mail folder.
>> But the e-mails was not sent! In the log of my mailsever i dont see a
>> e-mail and nobody of the recipients is getting this mail.
>
> A long shot, but is one of the 40 e-mail addresses invalid (such as
> containing a period at the end) ? One of our users had the exact same
> problem and it turned out she had an address in her list that had a
> period at the end.
>
>>
>> I have seen is depenting on the number of recipients. With 20-30 is
>> working fine.
>> The bug is that i dont get a message for non delivery.
>> Now my question is this a Imp problem or a cyrus or postfix ?


Seen with sendmail too.  We just had a case yesterday.  The last
address in the list was malformed.  (It was two addresses in the
Real Name <address> syntax with no comma between them.)

Regardless of that-- the other recipients should have got the message.
Sendmail wrote one line to syslog showing the from= and gave the
number of recipients as zero.  IMP is not parsing addresses right.

And regardless of that-- if IMP diagnoses or misdiagnoses a message
as having no recipients, the user should see something, and it would
make more sense to save it in a draft folder, not a sent mail folder.

I noticed that the sent-mail copy has the To: line as one very long
line.  It did not exceed the absolute limit of 998 in RFC 2822 but
it certainly well exceeded the 78 that "SHOULD" be the maximum.
Other clients break the To: into multiple lines, often one per
address, starting second and later lines with whitespace as per
the standard.  I do not know whether this contributes to the
error.  I also do not know what maximum length IMP allows per line
or per To: field.


Joseph Brennan
Academic Technologies Group, Academic Information Systems (AcIS)
Columbia University in the City of New York