Your message dated Wed, 13 May 2026 18:41:04 -0700
with message-id <6265563.UjTJXf6HLC@soren-desktop>
and subject line courier-mta: does not adhere to 'Be liberal in what you
accept, and conservative in what you send' principle
has caused the Debian Bug report #181930,
regarding courier-mta: does not adhere to 'Be liberal in what you accept, and
conservative in what you send' principle
to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
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--
181930: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=181930
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: courier-mta
Version: 0.40.2-3.1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream
Hi,
The Courier MTA doesn't adhere to Jon Postel's "Be liberal in what you
accept, and conservative in what you send" [rfc 791].
I have found 4 examples:
1) When a message which lacks the required MIME headers for 8-bit data
transport is fed to courier, courier mangles the message: the message's
MIME structure is destroyed, and the following extra MIME part is added:
>
> CORRUPTED MESSAGE
>
> This is the Courier Mail Server 0.40 on nagy.mdcc.cx.
>
>I received the following message for delivery to your address.
>Unfortunately, the sender's mail software did not properly format the
>following message according to Internet mail formatting protocols, and I
>can only deliver mail which has been properly formatted according to
>Internet standards. Instead of returning the following message as
>undeliverable, it is saved, in its original form, in the following
>attachment, which you can open with any editor or word processor.
>
>Please notify the original sender that their message was not properly
>formatted by their mail software. The specific mail protocol error in
>the original message is as follows:
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>The following message contains 8-bit content, but does not have the
>required MIME headers for 8-bit data transport.
>
>See <URL:ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2045.txt> for more information.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(When cron sends mail on a system running postfix as the MTA, chances
are high such messages are sent out. Perhaps cron should be compiled
with something else than /usr/sbin/sendmail as mailer, to be sure 8bit
data gets treated properly. Sendmail does have a ``EightBitMode=m''
option. Postfix currently implements just-send-eight. Other
mail-generating tools like e.g. apt-listchanges suffer from the same
problem.)
(On http://www.courier-mta.org/intro.html , the Courier author calls
dealing with these messages "Workarounds for known defects in other mail
software", and regards courier's behaviour as a feature, not a bug. I
wonder wether this bug will ever get closed... :)
2) Courier does not accept mail with envelope-From user@host (instead
of [email protected]). It will reply with:
Dec 17 09:47:50 banach courieresmtpd: error,relay=::ffff:127.0.0.1,\
ident=fetchmail,from=<MAILER-DAEMON@kubsu1>: 517 Syntax error.
3) Courier does not accept <#@[]> as envelope-From adress:
Feb 16 13:32:01 nagy courieresmtpd: error,relay=::ffff:192.168.26.6,\
ident=qmailr,from=<#@[]>: 517 Syntax error.
This breaks interoperability with qmail, which uses <#@[]> as the
envelope-from on bounce messages.
4) Courier bounces messages with very long lines, see Bug#181861.
Of course, there might be good reasons for handling these 4 examples of
corrupt messages specialy. However, I feel it should at least be
possible for the administrator to make courier accepting these messages
as is.
Bye,
Joost
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux nagy 2.4.20 #1 Mon Feb 17 22:47:33 CET 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
Versions of packages courier-mta depends on:
ii courier-authdaemon 0.40.2-3 Courier Mail Server authentication
ii courier-base 0.40.2-3 Courier Mail Server Base System
ii libc6 2.3.1-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libgcc1 1:3.2.3-0pre1 GCC support library
ii libgdbmg1 1.7.3-27.1 GNU dbm database routines (runtime
ii libperl5.8 5.8.0-17 Shared Perl library.
ii libstdc++5 1:3.2.3-0pre1 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
-- debconf information excluded
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--- Begin Message ---
I have recently taken over maintenance of the courier packages.
It appears to me that this email is actually four separate bug reports. As
such, it should be split into four separate Debian bugs.
Because this is so old, I assume that most or all of these issues have already
been addressed upstream.
For the above reasons, I am closing this bug report. If any of these four
issues are still valid, feel free to file a separate bug report for each one.
--
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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