problem with long message-IDs: Outlook chokes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Graham Charles
  • Start date Start date
G

Graham Charles

I get a fair bit of spam with message-IDs longer than 168 characters (or
missing). As a result, Outlook clients won't download any my messages until
I manually go through the mail server's incoming queue and delete the
messages; quite a pain as it happens roughly once daily (and there's no easy
way to tell which messages have the bad IDs).

Does anyone know a way to make Outlook skip these messages, rather than not
download anything? I'd even be interested in how to grep the files for long
message IDs (if only I were smarter about Windows utilities for that sort of
thing).

My mail server is WorkgroupMail, and despite their claim that it works with
Outlook, this problem makes it impossible to use the two together.
(Incidentally, my recommendation, if you're looking for a server, is that
you don't get WorkgroupMail until they fix this.)

Thanks for any advice,

g.
 
What version of Outlook do you have? What happens when Outlook tries to
download one of these problem messages - do you get an error message?
Outlook should not have a problem with Message-Ids longer than 168
characters - why do you think that length is the problem vs. something else
in the message?
 
Outlook XP SP1 on Windows XP Pro w/o SP. The 168 character figure was quoted
to me by the provider of the mail server software (WorkgroupMail), and it
seems to hold true. If I get a message with a long Message ID; Outlook won't
download anything. If I delete the
messageID from the message, Outlook goes off on its merry way.

The error that outlook throws is a generic Send/Receive error 80040005 and
no messages are sent. The bad message IDs are *really* bad (from spammers)
and might have other illegal characters in them for all I know. Here's an
example of one that it chokes on:

Message-ID:
<%RNDDIGIT13%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT13%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT13%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDI
GIT13%RNDLCCHAR13$%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT13%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT13%RNDLCCHAR13
%RNDDIGIT13$%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT14%RNDLCCHAR13%RNDDIGIT13@%RNDUCCHAR14%RNDD
IGIT13>

Looks like some sort of mail server directive that's intended to generate
random e-mail addresses, but never undergoes substitution.

Any ideas?

g.
 
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