Reworded re-post after off-list discussions.
I guess this is really a netscape issue rather than qmail, but related
to the qmail server at least. I'm running qmail-scanner and get into
problem areas when the scanner detects a virus in a message and sends
the bounce message to the originator and to postmaster. The bounce
message has a copy of the original headers etc, which it obviously must
have to be informative.
Some virii, grab a random piece of another email message and use it as
subject and body filler to pad out the message before attaching the
virus executable to the message. I have noticed that quite often these
random grabs of another message have formatting characters (^M, \223,
\233 etc) embedded in them.
I, as postmaster, get a LOT of these bounces and because of the
formatting characters in the subject line etc (this is my assumption
anyway), my mail client (Netscape), falls in a heap and is unable to
process the received mail, leaving a mess on the server and in my local
folders. I am having a lot of customers suffering from the same issue.
Would it be appropriate to modify qmail-scanner to detect formatting in
the subject line and if present try to remove it, or discard the subject
line all together? Has anyone else encountered this issue?
Brett
