284232 - Email notifications are split on lines starting with "From..."

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect)

Description

[Alexey Feldgendler]

User-Agent:       Opera/7.54 (X11; Linux i686; U)  [en]
Build Identifier: Bugzilla Version 2.16.7

When a comment contains a line that looks like "From - Tue Mar  1 14:09:20 
2005", without quotes (I'm not placing this text alone on a line in order not to 
trigger this bug), the notification email contains only the text preceding that 
line. The rest of the comment text, starting with the "From..." line, turns into 
another message (with the "From..." line being its header, not the body) that 
gets mailed to the same recipients as the first one.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. File a bug. Add someone to CC.
2. Post a comment containing the text "From - Tue Mar  1 14:09:20 2005" alone on 
a line, with some more text on other lines before and after that one.
3. Look into the inbox of the CC list member.
Actual Results:  
The CC list member receives two messages. The first message is a regular 
Bugzilla notification containing the summary of changes and the comment text up 
to, but not including, the "From..." line. The second message may look blank, 
but if you view its source, you'll see that it contains the "From..." line and 
the rest of the comment text. The "From..." line is located where the message 
headers usually go, so the user agent doesn't show it.

Expected Results:  
One regular comment notification, containing the full comment body, should be 
received by the CC list member.

Bugzilla Version 2.16.7.
FreeBSD 5.3
Sendmail 8.13.1

Comment 1

[Joel Peshkin]

Seems to be escaped properly in TIP.

There is a good chance this is broken in 2.18, though

Comment 2

[Alexey Feldgendler]

I coud not reproduce the bug on pristine installations of Bugzilla 2.18 and 1.
19.2 using qmail as MTA.

Also, on the buggy 2.16.7 installation with Sendmail, the line gets properly 
escaped with ">" if it reads just "From" or "From -", but "From -" followed by a 
valid date causes the message to be split. Another weird thing is that I 
couldn't find the second part of the split message in Sendmail logs -- neither 
on the host running Bugzilla, nor on the next hop on SMTP route. The second 
message seems to never have existed -- but I get it in my inbox. (My inbox is in 
mbox format, if that matters.)

To eliminate the chance of this being a bug in Sendmail, I tried feeding a 
message containing the dangerous line to stdin of "sendmail -t -i recipient". 
When I did so, the whole "From..." line got properly prepended with ">", and the 
message wasn't split. So it seems to be a bug in Bugzilla rather than in 
Sendmail (or a bug in each of them).

Comment 3

[Olav Vitters]

The From line is not escaped in 2.16.8, nor cvs. That you see two copies is due
to the combination of the mbox format and your mail reader. In the mbox format
new mails begin with that line. Some mail programs also use another header (I
thought Content-Length) to prevent this from happening.
The From lines are escaped by some programs (not sure which, I think procmail
and formail); I expect this was the case for Joel.

FYI, I use postfix, maildrop and Mutt using the Maildir (separate file per
email). These From lines are not escaped in 2.16.8, also not in cvs (both
running locally).

Alexey: Could you explain your setup a little more? What program delivers the
email in the mbox file?

Comment 4

[Alexey Feldgendler]

I have two FreeBSD servers: the first one running Bugzilla, and the second one 
holding my mailbox. On the first server, Bugzilla invokes local Sendmail to send 
out comment notifications. Sendmail passes it on to Sendmail on the second 
server, which, in turn, delivers it into my mbox file. Sendmail does mbox 
delivery itself, without using procmail, maildrop etc. On the second server, all 
mail is also checked by DrWeb. After that, I use Opera mail client to fetch mail 
from the second server using IMAP.

Sendmail usually escapes the "From..." line itself during local delivery. I've 
checked it by invoking "sendmail -t -i my_email" on the first server and feeding 
it a message containing the dangerous "From..." line. After that, I looked at 
the message in my mbox on the second server, and saw that the "From..." line had 
been prepended with ">". I think Sendmail did it when storing the message into 
mbox. But when Bugzilla does the same "sendmail -t -i my_email" thing, the 
message breaks in two. I have no idea why this happens.

Comment 5

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

If this is really a bug in Bugzilla, and it only happens on 2.16, and we can't
reproduce it on 2.18 or the tip, it's unlikely that this is the sort of fix that
would make it into the 2.16 branch.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

bkor, if you cannot reproduce this bug, please mark it as WFM.

Comment 7

[Olav Vitters]

Marking worksforme.

I know this is not a Bugzilla issue. Quoting the From line is not a job of the software sending the mail. Some mailbox types like mbox can have problems if Content-length isn't supported. It is up to the software delivering the emails to handle that.