Developers of Sympa

[Jeff Abbott <address@concealed>]

Folks,

One of our users noticed something interesting and I was wondering  
what the reason behind this implementation might be.  We've got  
messages from our Nagios system whose subjects contain asterisks and  
> symbols, like so:

  [nagios-alert] ** PROBLEM alert - servername->HTTP (servername) **

When users request that a copy of the message be sent to them, Sympa  
does so, but it also tosses the following error into the logs:

  get_parameters: syntax error for parameter subject ; dumped vars  
in /var/spool/sympa/tmp/sympa_dump.1152815733.1432

As near as I can tell, it's being triggered by both the * and >  
symbols in the message's subject, as part of the %in_regex hash in  
wwsympa.fcgi (which sets the 'subject' regex to '[^<>\\\*\$]+').  Why  
is this regex set the way it is?  I don't believe there are any RFC  
restrictions on valid characters in a message's subject, are there?

It's not really all that big a deal as the users do still have the  
message sent along to them, but it was brought to my attention and I  
don't have a good explanation for them, so I'm inquiring here.   
Thoughts?

Thanks,
Jeff