topic Re: another sendmail question in Operating System - Linux

another sendmail question

K.C. Chan — Thu, 15 May 2003 16:26:11 GMT

All,
I have someone trying to send email to my mail server, the email address contains apostrophe like: "k'man@somedomian.com". My mail server is having problem getting this email. I wonder, would the apostrophe cause my mail server to drop the mail? AOL recieved the email according to the user which presented me with the problem.

Re: another sendmail question

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 15 May 2003 17:47:17 GMT

My sendmail server barfs on that one too.

I don't think thats a legal name. Probably some spammer finding a way to spoof the anti spam measures taken by legitimate NSP's.

SEP

Re: another sendmail question

Stuart Browne — Thu, 15 May 2003 23:33:56 GMT

Ok, taking a quick (ok, a slight mangling of the truth) look at RFC821 (SMTP), the single quote (') is a valid character in a 'mailbox' name.

Strangely enough, it isn't considered a 'special' character, and should just work.

As to whether your MUA is correctly creating the envelope with the ' in it is a different question.

Have you tried testing your SMTP server directly?

telnet 25
HELO test
MAIL FROM:
RCPT TO:

See if you get the 'Recipient ok' response.

Now, delivering it to a local user is a different story. I'm pretty sure a Linux box cannot have a username with a ' in it. Using a ' in an alias works however.

Hope this helps.

Re: another sendmail question

K.C. Chan — Fri, 06 Jun 2003 01:25:20 GMT

Stuart,
My boss have no problem sending it to s'address@somenetwork.com, but he's having problem recieving it. He gets the email on his aol account (go figure), but through our email system. Any idea on how to test/debug this? Thanks.

Re: another sendmail question

Jerome Henry — Fri, 06 Jun 2003 05:55:14 GMT

One hypothesis is if the server supports php, then the mail function gets " and ' as the quote character, so "k'man" becomes "k" and the rest isn't understandable...
Could be a way.
J

Re: another sendmail question

K.C. Chan — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:28:50 GMT

It was the firewall which strip the "'".