aaNet rejects spamgourmet messages

[WiseOwl9001]

When I sent an email to one of my spamgourmet addresses it bounced back with:

571 sorry, sender address has invalid format

However when I redirected my spamgourmet emails to my fastmail.com.au account they came through fine.

Has anyone else experienced any such problems? I have address masking turned on.

Here is the thread I raised with my ISP about this:
http://forums.aanet.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=9643

Thanks for any insights anyone can provide.

Ben.

[SysKoll]

That link tells me I've been banned from the forum (!).

Please keep us posted about this problem.

[WiseOwl9001]

They say it is the envelope from address (hope I've got that right) that they're validating and finding invalid:

Yes we are blocking invalid sender addresses to protect the rest of our customer addresses. I dont see anything wrong with that and you will find most good mail servers do that.

Most people have a valid sending address so it doesnt affect them. If we get many complaints we can take it off but the spam level will increase and the mail server will slow down trying to deliver mail to non existent addresses.

Ultimatley what we do will be up to you guys and if enough want it, we will remove that restiction.

Another aanet subscriber said sending from his gmail.com account directly to his aanet.com.au address gave the same error...

[SysKoll]

Please tell these guys that spamgourmet addresses do NOT have an invalid format and are certainly a valid From field. Ask them to contact us if they really need to convince themselves. They will see that far from increasing their level of spam, spamgourmet actively decreases it by pre-filtering it.

Sheesh.

[WiseOwl9001]

Just to add - here's what I get in the body of the returned email:

Code: Select all

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<spamgourmetAddressHere@spamgourmet.com>
    (reason: 571 sorry, sender address has invalid format (#5.7.1 - chkuser))

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mail.aanet.com.au.:
>>> MAIL From:<>
<<< 571 sorry, sender address has invalid format (#5.7.1 - chkuser)
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable


The from appears to be empty - am I right? I suspect that is what mail.aanet.com.au is complaining about?

[SysKoll]

This message is created by the chkuser patch in qmail. The source code line is:

Code: Select all

#define CHKUSER_SENDERFORMAT_STRING "571 sorry, sender address has invalid format (#5.7.1 - chkuser)\r\n

This message is invoked within qmail when function check_sender_address_format() detects an invalid character in the sender address. If this function returns 0, the address is deemed to be invalid. Now, in this function is compiled with the constant CHKUSER_ALLOW_SENDER_SRS defined, you can have # and + in your sender address, otherwise you cannot. Which is silly since these characters are legal according to the RFC.

Was the rejected spamgourmet address a forwarding address containing these characters?

[josh]

Another way to test is to temporarily turn off "reply address masking" and try the test again. If it works that time, then it's almost certainly their system rejecting messages with + and # in them, which is not RFC compliant (on their part).

As for the missing From: address, I can't really comment -- our system substitutes the from address with the redirection address when reply address masking is on, but otherwise doesn't touch it. I've never seen a case where spamgourmet leaves it empty (unless it was empty to begin with).

[WiseOwl9001]

Thanks to a couple of aaNet users arguing just the same thing (that it's not in line iwth the RFC) aaNet have now removed that "restriction" so that spamgourmet.com emails are once again arriving at mail.aanet.com.au

Thanks for your help here too!

I didn't turn off reply address masking but just tried sending an email to one of my SG addresses and now thankfully it works

[SysKoll]

Yay. Thanks, aaNet. It takes a big sysadmin to admit a mistake!