Problem with invalid headers

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 17 Jan 2003, John Straiton writes:

> This one has been driving me crazy. I have a Cyrus/Postfix system in
> place that is working quite well. However, I have one customer who tries
> to deliver a particular message to an individual and I get a kick back
> that looks like this:
> 
> Jan 13 11:22:33 courier postfix/pipe[72222]: 2DBF85058B:
> to=<asncin at mx1.clickcom.com>, relay=cyrus, delay=0, status=bounced (data
> format error. Command output: asncin: Message contains invalid header )

>> From: <abrowning at adomain.com>
>> To: <monica at anotherdomain.org>
>> Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 16:19:55 "GMT"

I think that is a pretty unusual Date: header.  I've never seen one
with actual quote marks around the zone.  I just ran through some mail
archives with a few thousand messages, grepping out the Date:
headers... none did that.  And from my reading of RFC 822 and RFC2822
I don't think they are permitted.

I'd guess that whoever implemented the client or MTA that added that
Date: header did not know how to read the BNF in RFCs correctly.
There are quote marks around the three letter zone specifiers (defined
as obs-zone in Section 3.3 of RFC 2822) in the BNF.  But that means to
treat the stuff within them literally, not to include the actual quota
marks in the resulting string :-)

Disclaimer: I don't know if that *is* what Cyrus is complaining about,
but it stands out to my eye as the 'odd' header in your message.
Someone who knows the Cyrus codebase can probably quickly confirm or
deny whether the quotes there would be a problem for the Cyrus Date:
header parser or not.

Jonathan
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