[Mimedefang] questions about filter parsing, message mod'ing, and bouncing messages

[Joseph Brennan]

Jason Bertoch <jason at electronet.net> wrote:

> For really spammy
> messages, this line can get rather long, but hasn't produced any problems
> to the best of my knowledge.  Any false positive submitters have been
> able to include the expanded error message in their report.
>
> action_bounce("Message appears to be Spam. Matched $names for a score of
> $hits.");



RFC 2821 says "The maximum total length of a reply line including the
reply code and the <CRLF> is 512 characters."  That's pretty long so
maybe you never reach it.  I think I'd still make $names a substr of
itself to make sure.

Some of the office-memo systems like Exchange and Lotus Notes can
throw away or hide SMTP error messages and replace them with generic
messages like "You do not have permission to send".  It can be pretty
hard to get a good error report from their users (and it's not the end
users' fault that it's so hard).

Joseph Brennan
Lead Email Systems Engineer
Columbia University Information Technology