On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> I have recently made the observation that an email message won't fly
> if I have an asterisk at the beginning of a line in the text body of
> an email message prepared for sending with Arachne's email client.
> I will get the "Mail Upload Aborted" error page, or Arachne will
> "hang" until I click on "cancel". I have conducted some tests and
> I have found that this result is reproducible on two different
> machines running Arachne.
>
> I have not yet conducted any tests to see if placing an asterisk at
> the beginning of a line in the text body of an email message to be
> sent by an alternative email client would cause similar problems.
>
> I don't know if I have observed a bug in Arachne's email client.
> Perhaps the placing of an asterisk at the beginning of a line in the
> text body of an email message causes the message to be non-compliant
> with the RFC. Maybe it is wrong to start a line beginning with an
> asterisk when using any other email client as well.
>
> Can anyone enlighten us on this?
To troubleshoot this, I first sent asterisk-containing
messages from various clients. They all worked and were
delivered with the asterisk as typed.
Since I use Linux Arachne, there is no mail upload
function as in DOS, so I've modified sendmail.ah to
call a cgi-script which calls on the mail function
already available on any Linux distribution. It's a
bad hack still in its infancy, so I haven't made it
available to the list, however, using an asterisk at
the beginning of a line did have rather unpredictable
results.
The e-mail as typed:
-----
don't start with an asterisk
* start with an asterisk
-----
The e-mail as received:
-----
don't start with an asterisk
<long list of every file in my cgi-bin directory>
start with an asterisk
-----
I haven't yet checked whether an asterisk in the
middle of the line, at the end of the line, or
multiple asterisks has similar effect, or even perhaps
an attempt to escape the asterisk with \*
Obviously, the asterisk isn't being forced to
literal, but is acting as a wildcard. My first
inclination would be to think it's a problem with the
cgi script (and it may well be).
But the fact that there's also a problem with the DOS
version would lead one to perhaps suspect sendmail.ah.
I may look into that later... but gotta run right now.
- Steve
