From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616 Description of problem: Some spam arrives at my mail server with unprintable characters in the "from" address. When fetchmail attempts to download it to my local machine using POP3, it gives the error: fetchmail: SMTP error: 501 5.1.7 Syntax error in mailbox address "t[???o^?t.ha" (non-printable character) Later versions of fetchmail (e.g. fetchmail-6.2.5-2 as found in FC2) fix this problem. However, the latest version available for RHEL3 is only 6.2.0-3. This is causing my mailbox to fill up with large numebrs of errors from cron as fetchmail complains about the malformed messages each time it's run. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fetchmail-6.2.0-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Send a message with a non printable character in the from address to yourself 2. Attempt to download it using fetchmail 3. Additional info:
I'm sorry for the late response. Fetchmail <=6.2.3 is keeping the messages in the source mailbox if the bounce is sent to the postmaster; it is safer than deleting the e-mail because the bounce doesn't contain the body of the e-mail; if the e-mail were legitimate, it would be lost. I think that changing this behavior within a RHEL series would be breaking the stability promise of RHEL. You can configure fetchmail to just delete e-mails when it recieves a 501 response from the SMTP server (>instead of keeping them in the mailbox and sending a bounce) by adding 501 to the "antispam" variable in your .fetchmailrc.