[Esd-l] missing F in from line

[Scott Wiersdorf]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 01:50:13PM -0500, Dan Doucette wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I had something happen last week which seemed to strip the F off of the from
> line on any messages coming in. Users were unable to retrieve mail because
> the mailbox format was invalid, missing F. I reboot then put the F back in
> each users mailbox file and everything was fine. Has anyone had anything
> like this happen? Or is it possibly related to sendmail?

There is a known bug in certain versions of procmail (3.21 comes to
mind) that drops the 'F' if a pipe exits with a non-zero status. To
check your procmail, add this recipe to your procmailrc (usu.
$HOME/.procmailrc) file:

    :0fw
    |/nonexistent/program

and send yourself an email. If the leading 'F' is dropped from 'From',
see if procmail 3.22 will fix it (if you're using the 3.x branch,
otherwise maybe the latest 1.x will work). As a workaround, you can
add this recipe:

    :0hf
    ## 'From_' fixup filter (as suggested by David W. Tamkin
    ## in <007e01c2752a$c6824ea0$21985742 at ord351473>
    ## on the <procmail at Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE> mailing list
    * ^^rom( )
    |sed '1s/^/F/'

which checks for a missing 'F' at the very start of the message (^^
is that anchor) and adds it in via sed if it's missing.

Scott
-- 
Scott Wiersdorf
scott at perlcode.org