Sendmail - stripping incoming attachments ?

[Simon R Wootton]

Congratulations on being brave enough to read this one, it scares me stiff !

I have sendmail running on an N4000 with HPUX 11.00. Sendmail is currently acting as our main mailserver, and doing a pretty good job across 500+ users.

More recently, we're having some odd problems with incoming attachments being stripped out of emails. The intended recipient gets the email, but the attachment comes through as a renamed file which is very small in size.

These emails only account for a very small percentage of incoming emails that have attachments but importantly they are from different sources, so I can't point the finger at one source.

I'm fairly sure the problem is sendmail related, because we have setup a temp alternative email server using a linux box and this appears to handle them without a problem. The linux box cannot be put in place of the main server (unfortunately).

Sendmail appears to be a law unto itself, I get headache just reading about it. Does anyone have any idea's, or has anyone seen similar things ??

Any help will be rewarded!

Many thanks
Simon

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Simon,

What is happening can happen for a number of reasons.

1) The attachment file limit on an smtp gateway, intermediate server or even a third party product on this system strips attachments that are too large, versus leaving them the server.

2) A third party virus product or firewall product or sendmail post processor has stripped the attachment based on rules of the product.

3) A cron script scans the /var/mail directory or the spooler and looks for and reduces or removes certain mime attachments. I've designed prototypes for this and its not as complex as you think.

Take a look at your firewall maybe.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Sorry:

Version of sendmail? New ones available at software.hp.com

sendmail patching situation?

SEP

[Simon R Wootton]

Hi Steven

Ready for this ......

Sendmail revision from sendmail.cf file is

1.30.111.1

I'm guessing this is ancient. If so, how easy is an upgrade ?

Thanks
Simon

[Steven E. Protter]

swlist -l product | grep -i sendmail

Please post the output.

If you are running hp supported depot based sendmail an upgrade to 8.13.x is simple.

download

swinstall -s /tmp/sendmail.depot \*

No reboot(I think), probably a good idea to have the sendmail daemon down.

SEP

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Your Sendmail looks pretty old! Upgrade it to latest version and see it behaves correctly. Latest is 8.13.3 and you can get it from here.
Installation procedure is also given here.

http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=SMAIL813

-USA..

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Your Sendmail looks pretty old! Upgrade it to latest version and see if it behaves correctly. Latest is 8.13.3 and you can get it from here.
Installation procedure is also given here.

http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=SMAIL813

-USA..

[Simon R Wootton]

FAO Steven :

# swlist -l product | grep -i sendmail

PHKL_18799 1.0 PANIC in diskquota while running sendmai
PHNE_17190 1.0 sendmail(1m) 8.8.6 patch

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