The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[micah anderson <address@concealed>]

"Mail administrator, Otto J. Makela" <address@concealed> writes:

> It seems that you can wedge a Sympa installation hard by trying to send
> a message with UTF-16 encoded headers through it. We are running Sympa
> 6.1.4 but I don't think this has been fixed in the later releases, since
> the problem stems from the perl cpan library Encode::MIME::Header which
> still only supports UTF-8 in message headers.
>
> http://search.cpan.org/~dankogai/Encode-2.49/lib/Encode/MIME/Header.pm
>
> The symptom is that sympa.pl dies. Sympa will still accept messages,
> but does not distribute them. Removing the wedged message helps and the
> logjam gets cleared from the system.
>
> At least, this is my initial analysis. Anyone else seen this happen?

We have seen similar scenarios. There is nothing written to the log, the
process just dies. Restarting sympa just causes it to try and reprocess
the offending queue message again and die again. The only way I could
figure out which message was causing the problem was to strace the sympa
process and then look at the last message it was trying to deal with
before it died.

I have a handful of these offending messages saved, but the encoding
seemed to vary, and I'm not sure if they were UTF-16 or not. One thing
that they all had in common was that they were all digests.

We haven't had any since November, which is approximately when we
upgrade to sympa 6.1.15.

micah