Bug 505677

Summary:	"cataddr: string too long" error receiving mail from certain Exchange servers
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	advax
Component:	sendmail	Assignee:	Jaroslav Škarvada <jskarvad>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-daemons
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	4.4	CC:	jskarvad, petr.ruzicka
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
URL:	http://www.mmmug.co.uk/blogs/nweb/archive/2009/03/28/26631.aspx
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2010-04-21 12:12:01 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description advax 2009-06-12 21:21:48 UTC

Description of problem:

When email is received from certain servers (in our case, 2 regular partners running Microsoft Exchange), it is rejected. syslog shows "cataddr: string too long"

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
sendmail-8.13.1-3.3.el4.i386

How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Email to a user at the remote site who has an out-of-office autoreply
2. Wait for reply
3.
  
Actual results:
Mail not delivered, remote user gets rejection message, syslog shows
catadr error

Expected results:
Mail arrives

Additional info:
sendmail.org shows some information relating to this bug in the changelog for sendmail 8.13.2.
sendmail 8.13.8-2 built from RHEL 5.3 SRPM does not have the problem
The problem only happened for us when using TLS which was negotiated during SMTP.
If I disabled TLS, the problem did not occur. I was then able to capture the SMTP packets, but could see no formatting problem with the message - no bare CR, no long lines. Replaying the message
through openssl s_client starttls did not trigger the problem. The only odd
(but legitimate) feature was that the message body (nominally English text) was base-64 encoded UTF-8
So I do not understand why the error occurs, only that upgrading sendmail beyond the last RHEL4 version cures the problem.

I have no way to reproduce the problem apart from corresponding with users at the 2 sites in question.

Comment 1 Petr Ruzicka 2010-01-13 15:45:26 UTC

I have the same problem.

It looks like it's fixed in Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=131179

It's fixed in sendmail 8.13.2 (http://www.sendmail.org/releases/8.13.2)

Comment 2 Petr Ruzicka 2010-01-19 15:42:36 UTC

This is probably problem in MS Exchange configuration:

http://www.mmmug.co.uk/blogs/nweb/archive/2009/03/28/26631.aspx 

I can't verify it...

See you

PetrR

Comment 3 Jaroslav Škarvada 2010-04-21 10:47:39 UTC

The cataddr error is caused by TLS negotation phase between Exchange and Sendmail. 

There is upstream errata (2004-08-24) and patch available for cataddr errors:
http://www.sendmail.org/releases/8.13.1
http://www.sendmail.org/patches/parseaddr.c.cataddr.8.379

This patch was also merged to sendmail-8.13.2 by upstream and I assume it is the same piece of code as described in sendmail-8.13.2 changelog mentioned in comment #1.

This patch is applied from sendmail-8.13.1-2.el4 up, thus this error couldn't appear. Please could you reinstall sendmail-8.13.1-3.3.el4 and recheck?

Comment 4 Petr Ruzicka 2010-04-21 11:38:29 UTC

Hello.

I can still see this error messages in my logs, but as you wrote - it caused by MS Exchange.

I'm using sendmail-8.13.1-3.3.el4 and I can't reinstall it.

As far as I remember MS Exchnage can be configured to work well with Sendmail using TLS negotiation so you can close this ticket.

Thank you

PetrR

Comment 5 Jaroslav Škarvada 2010-04-21 12:12:01 UTC

OK, thank you, closing.