[Reportbug-maint] Bug#539157: direct SMTP send violates RFC1652 and sends unencoded 8-bit data

[Thorsten Glaser]

Package: reportbug
Version: 4.5
Severity: normal

I almost always use reportbug in direct SMTP mode, as I do not configure
a local MTA on the systems I run it on, which usually are chroots.

The bug reports get submitted to rietz.debian.org, which does not adver-
tise 8BITMIME in its EHLO response – yet reportbug fails to encode the
eMail body with quoted-printable or base64.

Then, rietz passes the messages to, for example, the *@mirbsd.org
servers, which do not advertise 8BITMIME either, but strip bit7 from
incoming mail. This is mostly a historic setup, originally intended
to “protect” the MDA and MUA. The message gets mangled badly (I’ve
seen quite some bad ones).

The mbox view on the Debian BTS clearly shows the 8bit characters,
in this case UTF-8, in the mbox (RFC822) format. While RFC2822 may
allow these things, RFC1652 (not obsoleted yet) explicitly states:

   If a server SMTP does not support the 8-bit MIME transport extension
   (either by not responding with code 250 to the EHLO command, or by
   not including the EHLO keyword value 8BITMIME in its response), then
   the client SMTP must not, under any circumstances, attempt to
   transfer a content which contains characters outside the US-ASCII
   octet range (hex 00-7F).

Thus, reportbug MUST be fixed to encode the eMail body prior to sending.

Please see ↓ as well:
‣ http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2009/07/cult-of-workarounds.html

Note that this bug report contains quite some 「Unicode」 characters ☺
I w̲i̲l̲l̲ send the mail as received by my MX as a follow-up to this PR.


-- Package-specific info:
** Environment settings:
EDITOR="/usr/bin/jupp"
DEBEMAIL="Thorsten Glaser <tg at mirbsd.de>"
INTERFACE="text"

** /home/tg/.reportbugrc:
reportbug_version "4.4"
mode expert
ui text
no-cc
header "X-Debbugs-CC: tg at mirbsd.de"
smtphost reportbug.debian.org

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-6-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/mksh

Versions of packages reportbug depends on:
ii  apt                           0.7.21     Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii  python                        2.5.4-2    An interactive high-level object-o
ii  python-reportbug              4.5        Python modules for interacting wit

reportbug recommends no packages.

Versions of packages reportbug suggests:
pn  debconf-utils                 <none>     (no description available)
pn  debsums                       <none>     (no description available)
pn  dlocate                       <none>     (no description available)
ii  exim4                         4.69-11    metapackage to ease Exim MTA (v4) 
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail-tran 4.69-11    lightweight Exim MTA (v4) daemon
ii  file                          5.03-1     Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gnupg                         1.4.9-4    GNU privacy guard - a free PGP rep
pn  python-gnome2-extras          <none>     (no description available)
pn  python-gtk2                   <none>     (no description available)
pn  python-urwid                  <none>     (no description available)
pn  python-vte                    <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information