Re: Possible minor bug in tmda-ofmipd

Ole Wolf wrote:
> I think I found a minor bug in tmda-ofmipd:
> 
> When I specify an ill-formed email address in my Thunderbird email
> client, tmda-ofmipd reports an error: "Internal exception in tmda-ofmipd."
> 
> I'd prefer not to tamper with my tmda-ofmipd setup to log the erroneous
> entries, but it seems that specifying an badly formed email address,
> such as "[email protected]; [email protected]" (without the quotes), in
> the "To:" field is enough to raise the exception when the email is sent.

I'm not sure this is a bug, depending on what aspect of the behaviour
you're seeing you believe is a bug!

If the recipient of the message that Thunderbird is sending is in an
invalid format, then either or both of the following will happen:

a) TMDA will fail to correctly parse the recipient address and reject it.

b) When TMDA sends the message off to the "real" SMTP server, it will
reject the "RCPT TO" command, and in turn TMDA must reject the message.

In either case, the message can't be sent, and an error is returned to
the mail client, which you're seeing.

Note that tmda-ofmipd can't simply accept the message, then generate a
bounce for it like a full MTA would (tmda-ofmipd is "just" a proxy).
This is because tmda-ofmipd doesn't have a persistent mail queue nor a
bunch of other stuff that a full MTA has; it only knows anything about a
message whilst it's in transit to the real SMTP server. I believe the
user experience is better, because your mail client will probably leave
the email open in a window, so you can just fix the destination address
and hit "send" again, with no cut/paste from "Sent items" or the bounce
message to create a new message.

Of course, if the bug you're reporting is the lack of detail in the
error message sent back to Thunderbird, then yes, we could probably
include more information somehow.

Wow, this got long-winded!

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