Mark,
>> I have been struggling with handling some pesky encoded characters in
>> mail logs as of late.
>>
>> My issue involves passing the message on to a remote rsyslog server
>> which then processes the messages into a database. From time to time I
>> see messages with something similar to the following:
>>
>> "Subject:<RE: VIAGRA \256 Official Site ID031831740>"
>>
>> In my case, messages are passed to processing mechanisms via triggers
>> prior to a final insertion but I am getting DB errors based on the
>> handling of these "invalid" characters.
>
> I'm not sure how you are getting an 8-bit character out of the log.
> Amavisd logging encodes all nonprintable characters as \nnn or \{xxxx},
> so syslog should not be seeing any. If your syslog daemon decodes that,
> it must not assume the decoded string will be a valid string in some
> encoding such as UTF-8, as the sender can put any junk in his subject
> or display name, and need not play by the rules.
>
Good points here as well. This is stock syslog on CentOS 5. I will look
into this area as well.
>> I don't think the use of mime2utf8 will help me in these types of
>> instances.
>
> I think the mime2utf8 comes closest to what can be achieved with
> decoding of text in Subject and From header fields. Anyway, the
> mime2utf8 should be able to always produce a valid UTF-8 -encoded text
> (although not necessarily printable), which is further protected by turning
> nonprintable characters to \nnn by the log writing code.
>
> If logging get further processing, you may prefer [:b64encode[:mime2utf8...
> instead of [:dquote|[:mime2utf8... in the log template.
>
This idea came to my mind last night too. I am going to do some testing
of live data with it and see what results it provides as well.
>> Also, after looking through previous mailing list messages
>> I've seen references to somewhat similar types of issues with the use of
>> setting the LANG= value with the invocation of amavisd-new. I may be not
>> thinking this through clearly, but I don't think that would help much in
>> this case since everything is happening after the fact on a completely
>> different system.
>
> That's unrelated. Setting locale to "C" on a mailer is still a sensible
> thing to do in principle.
>
>> Would I be better off in the log template doing some type of find and
>> replace regex on the fields to help escape these characters? Is that
>> even possible? Typically I'd do this in the code that is called by the
>> trigger but I'm not quite getting that far along in the processing yet
>> to do that. My thinking at this point is to escape any backslashes
>> before I write the log and then hopefully I can handle the escaped
>> characters elsewhere.
>
> Are you replacing the write_log() with your own code?
>
Not at this time no.
>> I see the following noted in the README.customize file:
>>
>> "If assigning to variables, care must be taken to properly quote certain
>> special characters (like backslash), as required by Perl quoting rules.
>> Text read from amavisd file or from external files is not subject
>> to Perl quoting rules."
>>
>> But what is the best practice to do so within the templates and the
>> available macros? Or is it more raw perl within the template that I need
>> to consider?
>
> No interpretation/decoding of characters in templates is done by
> amavisd - it uses the text as provided in a variable. How you put it
> into a variable depends on your config file: assigning a "..." or '...'
> enclosed text to a variable is subject to Perl's interpretation of
> qq() and q() or a 'here-document'. Or you may be reading the
> text from a file, in which no interpretation occurs.
>
>> After additional troubleshooting and trial and error of my issue, it is
>> looking more like I need to take a more simple approach of a find and
>> replace mentality to the content passed to amavisd-new.
>>
>> Looking through README.customize I don't see any predefined macros which
>> do such a thing thus far, and am considering a custom macro to do just
>> this.
>>
>> I wanted to throw this out to the list to make sure I'm not overlooking
>> something obvious or already available.
>
> I can adapt the macro mime2utf8 or similar if you can explain
> what is it that it is supposed to do in place of its current function.
>
I'm not sure that is necessary at this time, but was something I was
toying around with possibly doing here as well. Again, I am going to
allow for more time to test on my end of things. Unfortunately, I can't
quite answer for you what exactly tell you what I am wanting it to do in
addition just yet. Hopefully I can better answer that as I get more data.
Thanks again for your response. After I do more troubleshooting/testing
on my side I will report any findings that may be beneficial to the
discussion.
Clay
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