The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Liam,

Sorry for the late answer. We were quite in the middle of something and, 
well, sometimes time just flies.
Sorry again.
About your message, now.
Yes, you have two problems, different, but they happened at the same 
time so it can be confusing. It is unlikely they are related, though.
The first one involves your mail interface:

> I stopped and restarted sympa, and initially there were two sympa.pl
> processes (as expected) but then one of them died again, and the messages
> in ~sympa/spool/msg were still just sitting there not being processed.
> At this point some additional files showed up in the ~sympa/spool/tmp
> directory, and one of them also had the line quoted below about
> "Unrecognized line... Message.pm line 89".
>
> I removed a bunch of spam messages from the msg directory and was able
> to restart sympa normally, and now it's running.  So, I think that one
> of the messages was causing a problem.
>
> You can check out the files here: http://www.numenet.com/sympa-err
>
> In ~sympa/spool/tmp I found three files:
> 13885.stderr
> 13886.stderr
> sympa_dump.1181582290.23287
>
> The last line of 13885.stderr is:
>   
> > Unrecognised line: address@concealed>  at /home/sympa/bin/Message.pm line 
> > 89
> >     
> If you look at that msg, you can see that Amavis added
>   
> > BAD HEADER Non-encoded 8-bit data 
> >     
> And I suspect that the non-encoded From line may be causing the problem in
> sympa.
>   
You're right. The .stderr files are created when sympa.pl crashes. They 
gather its standard output. Then the last message you find is certainly 
the cause of the crash. And it happens to be relative to the line 89 of 
Message.pm, in which we parse the From header field of the message.
Anyway, to pursue further investigation, we need to see the message 
file. When we click on the link you provided, we run into a 503 error. 
Could you please correct this to let us access your files?
> The dump file seems to have been created after wwwsympa received some
> strange input.  I found this in /var/log/messages and /var/log/sympa:
>
> [snip/]
>
> Jun 11 10:18:10 pythagoras wwsympa[23287]: [robot lists.mpjc.org]
> [client 65.88.178.10] get_parameters: syntax error for parameter list
> value 'http:��lists..
> mpjc.org�wws�subrequest�bulletin' not conform to regexp
> /^[\w\-\.\+]*$/ ;
> dumped vars in /home/sympa/spool/tmp/sympa_dump.1181582290.23287
>
> [snip/]
> ------------------------
>
>   
This is the second problem. In the sympa web interface, when a parameter 
doesn't comply to the expected format a dump is created containing the 
whole context to help admins understand the problem. Fortunately this is 
harmless to sympa. We can check this dump too, but the problems seems 
related to encoding : the slashes in the URL seem to have been replaced 
by the sequence "�", Was it due to copy/paste from an encoding to 
another, a faulty web client or something else? Only inspection of the 
dump could answer this question.
> There is quite a bit of spam arriving.  I discard the worst, but to avoid
> false positives I have to allow a somewhat lenient spam policy.  I think
> there
> is a way to have sympa discard spam (that is, as identified by SpamAssassin
> headers).  Can someone remind me what it is?
>   
There's a howto about it. Check out this web page:
http://www.sympa.org/wiki/faq/tips_and_howto?#how_to_moderatereject_suspected_spam_messages

Regards,

--
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités