[ma-linux] How do I fix this mail header?

[Toby Fisher]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Janina Sajka wrote:

>  Here's the salient portion of the 'Returned Mail' message:
> 
> 
>     ----- Transcript of session follows -----
>     ... while talking to stpete.freedomscientific.com.:
>     >>> MAIL From:<janina at cantata.rednote.net> AUTH=<>
>     <<< 501 Syntax error - badly formatted address
>     501 5.6.0 Data format error
> 
>     First of all, is this garbled? Should the 'auth=' show up on the
>     same line as the 'From:'? Or is this just an artifact of the error
>     handler?

It's rare for an mta to rewrite a header like that, so I'd suggest it's an 
error at your end, unless the receiving mta's authentication settings are 
severely broken.

 >     Second, what controls the auth= field? How would I even go about
>     stripping this empty field? Better still, how do I set it to reflect
>     a true value?

Unfortunately I can't help you here as I've never used authenticated smtp.

>     I'm perplexed by the authentication docs on this point. They seem to
>     refer to this variable, but I don't see where/how it's defined for
>     sendmail.

Perhaps that may be part of your problem - it's not been defined, and the 
other end doesn't like the empty variable, and if other messages are being 
sent to mtas that don't use authentication it won't matter as they may 
ignore it, on the other hand it could be that this mta doesn't do 
authentication, but it's config is broken to the extent that it can't 
handle an empty but present variable.  Sorry for the vagueness on this but 
I'm kind of guessing here, just putting some suggestions your way.

>     PS: I am using cyrus sasl and starttls to authenticate mail from my
>     portable while I'm on the road. I believe it's working correctly.

I'm not really sure how you test such things, I guess you're more up on 
that than me, but I hope you manage to get it working.

Cheers.

-- 
Toby Fisher	Email: toby at tjfisher.co.uk
Tel.: +44(0)1480 417272	Mobile: +44(0)7974 363239
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