[Tfug] Anyone seen AOL email problems starting Wednesday

[Choprboy]

On Friday 11 June 2004 15:09, Terence Rudkin wrote:
> I have not seen AOL in particular but have seen lots issues with smtp
> servers of late.    I support Oracle programing languages.  We have an
> API that does smtp.  the API is a thin wrap on the command to smtp like
> helo(...), rcpt(...).   We have been getting a rash of complaining;
> 'this stopped working for no reason.'  
> 
> One such case the user had coded the string for rcpt as
> rcpt( "To : someone at eamil"   )
> this was code existing for over a year that stopped working.  The fix
> was to code 
> rcpt( "To: someone at eamil"   ) ## no space before colon.
>
I know the answer to that! Having a space inbetween the "To" and ":" is in 
fact a violation of RFC822/2822 (section 2.2). But I have seen the format 
before as well. Many spam/virus filters seem to be getting far more stingy 
about such things as most virus/spam programs are rather lax when it comes to 
standards... Apparently your Oracle app is really a virus ;-)

> There has been lots of these in the last three weeks. 421 errors, and
> other errors, from code that did work before.
>   
> If you do 
>   telnet smtpserever 25 
> you can work interactively and better see error text then you might from
> an email client. 
> 

Yeah, I finally found the culpurit after spending a while on the phone with 
AOL and then telnet'd into one of their MXs for an hour. Most mail was going 
through fine, but one of my automated PHP scripts was failing every time. I 
thought it was a difference between my SMTP "MAIL FROM:" and the 'From:" 
header in the mail, but couldnt figure it out. The SMTP session would 554 at 
the conclusion of the DATA.

I finally stumbled on the cause, AOL seems to have added a filter based on the 
order of the headers. My PHP mail script was very close to the example 4 of 
the PHP manual (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php). Where a set 
of additional headers has the following order:
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
    To: Mary <mary at example.com>, Kelly <kelly at example.com>
    From: Birthday Reminder <birthday at example.com>

Note: the PHP mail() function automatically prepends a To: and Subject: header 
based on the inputs to the function.

It turns out that the From: header MUST procede the MIME and Content headers 
in the message, otherwise it fails. The relative order of "To:" "Subject:" 
"Date:", etc. do not seem to make any difference..... What a pain in the 
butt.

Adrian