What follows is the header from an email sent from a valid account to another valid account, here at UCD. The recipient was concerned that this message would be tagged as 'consistent with spam' and/or 'bad headers'. My thoughts were that perhaps its because the user is on an older Macintosh, running an old version of Quick Mail, which perhaps doesn't follow standard email protocol/form? Any ideas?
The E-mail failed both the SPAMHEADERS test (which detects legal but spam-like headers, that are not sent by normal mail clients) and the BADHEADERS test (which detects broken spam-like headers, that are not sent by normal mail clients).
This is one of the nasty cases where there are multiple intertwined problems:
Date: 20 Mar 03 18:30:01 -0800
This causes the BADHEADERS test to get triggered, because the E-mail was supposedly sent in 1903. That's before computers were invented. In real-life terms, their mail client is not Y2K compliant (and not compliant to the RFCs as of the early 1990s, where the Y2K issue was identified). It should be sending 4-digit years.
Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
This is a dual (intertwined) problem, that causes both the SPAMHEADERS and BADHEADERS tests to fail.
It fails the SPAMHEADERS test because the Message-ID: wasn't included in the E-mail that was sent. This one here was added by IMail.
It also fails the BADHEADERS test because the Message-ID: header is broken. That's because it says that "169.237.80.51" is a hostname (if an IP, it would appear as "[EMAIL PROTECTED]>"), but it isn't a hostname. IMail did that because the mail client claimed to be an Internet host "169.237.80.51" (via the HELO/EHLO data), but again, that isn't a valid hostname.
So the mail client really needs to be fixed. :)
-Scott--- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)]
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