I've had to research this problem in the past. In the company for which I
used to work, we had three different server admins in three different
offices, each running a different MTA (VOPmail on NT, SendMail on Linux, and
qMail on Linux). We ran into problems with qMail accepting mail from our
VOPmail server.
After much research (and heated arguments), we found some posts in the qMail
news groups in regards to the manner in which qMail handles (or doesn't
handle) Bare LFs (ASCII Line Feed characters without corresponding ASCII
Carriage Returns).
Although, according to the standards, Bare LFs are not allowed within
message headers or at the end of the message, Bare LFs (and any other ASCII
character for that matter) are allowed within the body of the message
itself.
qMail, though arguably the most standards compliant MTA around, has (had) a
couple bugs in the code which both stripped LF/CR pairs, replacing them with
Bare LFs, and refused to accept any message with a Bare LF, even if the Bare
LF(s) occurred within the body of the message.
The former is a particularly egregious bug as it actually changes the
content of the message aside from merely appending headers. The second,
occurring under specific circumstances, is what caused the problem Ian
mentioned.
For this reason, most qMail admins run qMail with a switch (which I forget
off hand) which tells qMail to ignore all Bare LFs. The switch's original
purpose was to make qMail backwards compatible with older MTAs (such as
SendMail) which have historically ignored Bare LFs, allowing major companies
to develop e-mail clients which never use LF/CR pairs.
If you're experiencing one of these problems, and the latest version of
qMail doesn't fix them, I found posts in the news groups which identified
the offending piece of source code and discussed the best way to change the
code so that the server could be recompiled without the bugs.
Benjamin S. Rogers
Web Developer, c4.net
voice: (508) 240-0051
fax: (508) 240-0057
-----Original Message-----
From: Judah McAuley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 7:47 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: OT: mail transfer agents
At 04:27 PM 7/14/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>Watch out when using cfmail on solaris (and more than likely linux as
>well) when sending via a qmail SMTP server. I recently found that the
>messages wouldn't go out because of bare linefeeds. CF would return the
>messages to the coldfusion/mail/undelivr folder. The workaround was to
>save the entire template with the cfmail tag in "dos" format (Studio was
>saving in unix format...The unix2dos program was useful) Then the qmail
>server will accept the message. Very annoying, but the mail does seem to
>be going out now!
>
>So far I have not run across this problem with sendmail.
>
>Ian
I haven't had that problem with qmail under linux. I can send a message
using cfmail (on an NT box) through qmail as an smtp server running on a
Linux box. No issues.
Judah
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