[Mimedefang] multiplexor error - slave died

[Michael McCarthy]

At 10:16 AM 4/02/02 -0800, you wrote:
>I've been getting the following in my maillogs:
>
>Feb  4 04:12:36 mail mimedefang-multiplexor: Slave 0 stderr: Can't call
>method "path" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bin/mimedefang.pl line
>504.

I used to get quite a lot of these too. As the rest of the error message 
says, must be when Mime::Tools figures there's an empty mime part. I 
"fixed" it by adding the following code at the start of sub filter in 
mimedefang-filter (action_quarantine is only called from there).

sub filter {

     my($entity, $fname, $ext, $type) = @_;
     my($body) = $entity->bodyhandle;
     :
     if (!defined($body)) {
        return action_drop_with_warning("Dropping empty attachment '$fname'.");
        }

This also solved some similar errors in my mimedefang-filter since I'm 
doing some other stuff with $body->path.

Like you, this was only happening rarely - the repeated syslog errors were 
mostly retries.

I haven't been paying much attention now that the syslog errors have gone 
away, but I just had a look and located one message with a dropped empty 
attachment. It was that "women drivers!" which originally has a bunch of 
jpeg attachments (but no other content I think). Someone forwarded it to 
one of our users from a hotmail account (X-Mailer: MSN Explorer 
7.00...).  Mimedefang.pl complained about a "Non-multipart entity with 
sub-parts??". The jpegs didn't get forwarded and the message got mangled. 
30 seconds later msn.com also sent another message to the same user with no 
subject and no content apart from some signature stuff...I figure it's in 
the category of "broken mailer".

-
================
Michael McCarthy
IT Manager
School of Psychology
The University of Queensland
+617 3365 6687