Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Jeff,

The message subject is a parameter in this form because this same form 
is either used to receive a copy of the message or reply to a message ; 
the later requiring the message subject. We apply regular expression to 
every incoming parameters in wwsympa as an obvious safety mecanisme.

The subject parameter obviously does not need such a restrictive regexp 
and therefore we've extended it in Sympa CVS version :
http://sourcesup.cru.fr/cgi/viewcvs.cgi/sympa/wwsympa/wwsympa.fcgi?r1=1.676&r2=1.677

Thanks for reporting this problem.

Jeff Abbott wrote:

> 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?