Re: 1.1.6 introduced "Bare LFs in SMTP"?

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Fri, 22 June 16:55 Scott Thomason wrote:
| Greetings. A week ago I installed 1.1.5. Yesterday I upgraded to 1.1.6
| and the corresponding version of libesmtp via the indicated RPM's on
| my RH71 system. Now, whenever I try to create and send a new message
| (but not when I reply or forward an existing, previous message), the
| send fails. I turned debugging on (a good feature!) and I get this
| message: See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html. I do indeed run
| the latest version of qmail, which I have used for a long time (but
| recently re-installed on a new server about two weeks ago).
| 
| Any ideas what I might try to do away with this error so I can send
| mail again?

Qmail objects to mail where the line endings are bare \n Unix style.
RFC 821/822 (published 1982) state that canonical line endings are
CR-LF. libmutt terminates lines with \n *not* CR-LF.  The libESMTP
callback  (have a look in libbalsa/send.c) trys to work around this by
translating from Un*x line endings to canonic line endings.

However since RFC 821/822 also allow \r and \n to exist within a
line without terminating it, this can't be done reliably.
(RFC 2821/2822 change this; they prohibit unpaired \r and \n.)

IMO libmutt and gmime etc. should terminate lines with CR-LF but
they don't!  (One would expect everything should comply with the
standards after only 19 years, sigh.)

Maybe something is wrong in the translation.  Another possibility is
a partial last line in the message.  This might be a boundary case
not handled correctly.  I'll check this out over the weekend.

Brian Stafford

P.S. you are using libESMTP?