*BSD News Article 15294


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Xref: sserve comp.mail.sendmail:7411 comp.os.386bsd.bugs:598
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!pacbell.com!iggy.GW.Vitalink.COM!wetware!spunky.RedBrick.COM!psinntp!psinntp!monymsys!sonyd1.broadcast.sony.com!blilly.uucp!bruce
From: bruce@blilly.uucp (Bruce Lilly)
Subject: Re: arpatounix() fix for sendmail 5.67a/IDA-1.5
References: <1r04pe$7bg@werple.apana.org.au>
Organization: Bruce Lilly
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 93 23:18:06 GMT
Message-ID: <1993Apr27.231806.15158@blilly.uucp>
Reply-To: lilb@sony.compuserve.com (Bruce Lilly)
Lines: 34

In article <1r04pe$7bg@werple.apana.org.au>,
 posted to comp.mail.sendmail,comp.os.386bsd.bugs,
 andrew@werple.apana.org.au (Andrew Herbert) wrote:
>Recently my sendmail was having a really hard time with a message arriving
>with a date field "Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 16:36:25 +119304028 (CDT)".  The
>huge timezone offset was resulting in a corrupted state structure in the
>ctime(3) library routines (presumably from the call to asctime() made at the
>end of arpatounix()).  

The offset must be of the form HHMM (i.e. there must be
precisely 4 digits). See RFC822 section 5.1 (and RFC1123 section
5.2.14 (which incorrectly references RFC822 section 3 instead of
the aforementioned section 5.1)).

There is no restriction on the values of the HHMM digits.

I recommend that you send mail to the site originating the bogus
header informing them of the problem so that they can correct
their software (which is clearly not in compliance with the
RFCs).

The correct numeric offset for CDT (assuming the comment is
appropriate) is "-0500".

I don't belive that your patch would generate the equivalent
time.

Any non-comment, non-whitespace left over after 4 digits of a
numeric zone should probably trigger an ``unparseable date''
warning, since there is no reasonable interpretation of more
than 4 digits.

--
	Bruce Lilly		...uupsi!monymsys!sonyd1!blilly!bruce