Problems with e-mail containing non utf-8 characters

[Mark Martinec via amavis-users]

Thomas,

> I am getting stuck with e-mail mostly coming from outside the US, mostly
> Europe (mailing lists)
> 
> I am getting this message when I query the mailq in postfix
> 
> (host 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1] said: 451 4.5.0 id=04163-02 -
>    Temporary MTA failure on relaying, from MTA(smtp:[127.0.0.1]:10026):
>    No resp. to data-dot (in reply to end of DATA command)
>    first.last AT btspuhler DOT com
> This is when the e-mail should get re-injected from amavis into postfix
> Googeling for this leads to amavis not recognizing some non ascii
> characters. In some listings it is said to be a Perl bug. But those are a
> few years old, incl older Perl versions.
> I have: perl-5.16.3 amavisd-new-2.8.0
> Attached is one of those e-mails I pulled out of /var/spool/postfix/deferred

I'm not aware of any such problems with non-ASCII characters
with recent versions of perl and amavisd. Mail processing and
forwarding is supposed to be 8-bit clean, including null characters
and other funnies.

The diagnostics indicates that the failure occurs in the last phase,
when mail is being forwarded back to a MTA in a SMTP session,
and apparently MTA failed to respond to end-of-message dot
in reasonable time. Check the log for timestamps, both the
amavisd and the Postfix log.

Likely reasons would be: some milter or additional content filter
invoked by a MTA, of a broken firewall between amavisd and MTA.

  Mark