[BUGS] sendmail modifying incoming (possibly outgoing) mail

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Jonathan,

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:11:51 +1100
jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:

> in teh attached file every single "From " has been altered to
> ">From " as i said i have checked the file and before sending  
> the "From" lines are clean but upon receipt (here and at
> freebsd org) these lines are noe sporting an additional chr in
> teh form of ">From " this extra ">" confuses spamassasin.

This is standard operating procedure for sendmail, at least when
there is no Content-Length header line, because From at the
beginning of a line is what signifies the start of a message, at
least in mbox format.  It's always been like that.  From at
the beginning of a line that *isn't* the start of a message is
magically turned into ">From" to avoid confusing mbox-using
mail readers at the far end.

> i am not sure if upgrading my software will solve this
> issue/problem, at any rate the hardware in question will not
> run freebsd v6.2/7. onwards, wont install because of base
> changes alianating my kind of hardware so upgrading is ont an
> option in for the immeadiate future .. failing this ..

No need to upgrade anything.  What you're describing is just
"the way it is".

> is it possible to fiddle with my frebsd to make sure that it is
> not my end making this happen and thus  .. well thats another
> story.

You have three choices: 1) send your ^From-delimited (mbox format)
mail archive as a MIME attachment, preferably inside a .zip or
.gz file, 2) Send them using a mailer that correctly sets the
Content-Length field, which should stop this behaviour (I
thought that mutt was one of those, though) 3) just put up
with it: it's perfectly repeatable, it can be tidied up at the
far end with a sed-script, and it's not really going to worry
anyone.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew