Certain spam emails timeout qmail delivery

pixeltweek · Jul 14, 2004

I'm running qmail 1.03 on 2 different servers each with different domains (home: Suse 7.0 and office: Suse 8.2) and have a very severe problem on both. Typically, both systems work flawlessly except when certain spam emails come in. When qmail tries to deliver such email, both Outlook and Eudora (on several different machines) timeout while waiting for the server to send it. The only solution is to manually go the Maildir/new folder and delete the email... very inconvenient. I have included an edited sample below of one such piece of spam that creates this problem. Any ideas? Anyone else have this problem? Any solutions? Help!
Thanks, Jim

Return-Path: <till@seznam.cz>
Delivered-To: validuser@ourdomain.com
Received: (qmail 6946 invoked from network); 13 Jul 2004 23:50:57 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO cpe-69-75-78-85.dc.rr.com) (69.75.78.85)
by ourdomain.com with SMTP; 13 Jul 2004 23:50:57 -0000
From: Frank Hall <till@seznam.cz>
To: validuser@ourdomain.com
Subject: Viagra - bottom-priced
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 23:39:18 +0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
type="multipart/alternative";
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_56FE6326.6B0EF6D5"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0000_56FE6326.6B0EF6D5
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_001_0001_5A3FA046.0F0E5281"

------=_NextPart_001_0001_5A3FA046.0F0E5281
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Remedy for erection problems

...<bunch of spam here, you get the idea>...

------=_NextPart_001_0001_5A3FA046.0F0E5281
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<HTML><HEAD>
<BODY text=#000000 vLink=#ffffff aLink=#ffffff link=#ffffff bgProperties=fixed
bgColor=#094e64 leftMargin=0 topMargin=0 rightMargin=0 marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0">
<TABLE height=16 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" bgColor=#e8e8e8
border=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD width="100%" height=1>
<P align=left></P></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE height=108 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" bgColor=#87c505
border=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD width="100%" height=108><A style="TEXT-DECORATION: none"

...<lots more html spam here, too>...

<P align=center><FONT face="Arial Black" color=#ffffff size=4>We ship to
over 150 countries!</FONT></P></A></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></BODY></HTML>

------=_NextPart_001_0001_5A3FA046.0F0E5281--

------=_NextPart_000_0000_56FE6326.6B0EF6D5--

thedaver · Jul 14, 2004

I see problems in the construct of the message when the "boundary" statements are reviewed. They don't match or appear to be out of order.

Which are probably there because ....
1) They deliberately create hateful awful confusing non-compliant email spam to annoy the filters
or
2) They deliberately create hateful awful confusing non-compliant email spam to annoy the mail clients
or
3) They are absolute dolts who are creating non-compliant email and don't know that it's probably difficult for some standards-based tools to handle.

I _THINK_ that there are non-conforming email filters "out there" that can be enabled to just categorically chuck anything as malformed as this example appears to be....

I don't see anything in it per se that would otherwise hang a spam filter.

http://www.surfinbox.com/dir.php

pixeltweek · Jul 16, 2004

Thanks for the ideas. I'm a C programmer so I understand the need to balance syntax, however I have virtually no knowledge of email compliance issues. I'm just surprised that no one else seems to have this problem.
Cheers,
Jim

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Certain spam emails timeout qmail delivery

pixeltweek

IS-IT--Management

thedaver

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pixeltweek

IS-IT--Management

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