Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 135060
Bad address syntax
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:51 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 Description of problem: I get "bad address syntax" error while trying to fetch mail from a remote pop3 server. The problem is serious, because the corresponding mails are lost for ever (the ones with bad address syntax). But, this error occurs only when I receive mail from a yahoo mail group. I don't know if the problem is in fetchmail or in postfix. I have a cyrus-imapd server (cyrus-imapd-2.2.3-11) and I use postfix for mail delivery (postfix-2.0.18-4) If I try to see the "bad" emails with a web mail interface, that the provider has, these mails are displayed correctly. NOTE: All other emails are received correctly. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fetchmail-6.2.5-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Receive a mail from a yahoo group mail to a remote pop3 account. 2. Try to fetch it, using fetchmail and deliver it to local cyrus-imapd server using postfix. 3. Actual Results: "501: Bad address syntax" is shown and the mail is lost Expected Results: Fetch correctly the email or in the case of an error, not to delete from the pop3 account, the corresponding emails. Additional info: In the past, everything worked fine in the same configuration. I will attach a log file generated with fetchmail -v.
Created attachment 104933 [details] Fetchmail's log File generated using command "fetchmail -v"
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
As far as I can see, this is what happens: The e-mail probably contains an invalid Return-Path header, likely Return-Path: sentto-4139122-3310-1097238050-hash=rdslink.ro@returns.grReceived: (qmail 2050 invoked from network); 8 Oct 2004 12:20:58 -0000 * fetchmail attempts to use it as a sender's e-mail address; postfix correctly rejects it. * fetchmail attempts to bounce the e-mail to the sender; postfix correctly rejects it as well. * fetchmail can't do anything about that e-mail now; if fetchmail was leaving such e-mails in the mailbox, the mailbox could eventually become full, leading to loss of "valid" e-mails. So it deletes the e-mail because it can't ever be delivered anywhere. This is all behaving as intended. If you want to, you can (and probably should) use "set no bouncemail" to direct the bounce to your mailbox; that way you will recieve at least the bounce. Note that it is possible that there is a bug in fetchmail header parsing code; I think it is rather unlikely because there are other reports of similarly mangled e-mails (e.g. http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2004-May/008631.html), but it is still possible. If you come across such a "bad e-mail" in the web interface again, please try to get all its headers (unmodified); if it doesn't contain any mangled Return-Path header, please reopen this bug report and attach at least the headers.