I had been having problems getting DNN 2.1.2 to send e-mails (for SMTP test, password reminder, verification etc.) to my e-mail address. Bulk e-mail worked, as did a different yahoo e-mail account. After having my e-mail hosting company techs look at the problem, they found that the virus protection (Declude virus software) on the mail server was stopping the e-mails from going through. They said it was because the e-mails had malformed headers that made the virus software think it was a virus. When they disabled a certain feature of the virus protection, the e-mails started coming through. This was not a problem in 2.0.4.

I'm concerned that every mail server that uses this virus protection and possibly others may not allow DNN e-mails. Does anyone know of this problem and what was changed in version 2.1.2 that could be causing this? The techs at my hosting company said they would be happy to work with someone here and give them more info to help resolve this. Just let me know and I'll send their contact info.

Brett
Brett@incompass.us

Any chance they said specifically what was mal-formed in the header?

I e-mailed them your question and will post their answer when I receive it.

Here are the Log entries from Declude virus software

Qbe0b510f013cf66e Outlook 'CR' vulnerability [Subject: ] in line 7

Qbe0b510f013cf66e File(s) are INFECTED [[Outlook 'CR' Vulnerability]: 0]

Qbe0b510f013cf66e Scanned: CONTAINS A VIRUS [MIME: 1 2]

Description from Declude documents:

Outlook 'CR' Vulnerability: This vulnerability occurs when an E-mail contains a single 'CR' character within the E-mail headers (as opposed to a 'CR' followed by an 'LF', which is used to end a line in SMTP). Outlook can treat this as the end of the headers, which would allow Outlook to see a virus that was embedded in the headers. RFC2822 2.2 says that CR and LF characters cannot appear alone in the headers. Also, there is no legitimate reason for an E-mail to contain a lone 'CR' in the headers.

Had a quick look at this and the "problem" seems to be with the systemmessages.xml file. There are carriagereturns after the value nodes eg.

<value>


[Portal:PortalName] New User Registration


</value>

These get loaded to the database where the carriagereturn is persisted. It shouldn't be a problem as they're in the bodytext, but as they are the first characters after the headers, maybe thats the source of your error. I tried to fire together a sql statement to replace CR with CRLF (replace(MessageValue,char(10),char(13)+char(10)) ), but as it's a ntext field it needs to be done via UPDATETEXT, and I don't have the time to hack together a solution currently (its 2am here)

Could you try editing the FormatSystemMessage function in systemmessagesdb.vb and adding the following just before the Return strMessageValue line, to see if it works. You'll have to recompile of course.

strMessageValue = Replace(strMessageValue,vbcr,vbcrlf)

Cathal

I have made the change and emailed my email hosting company to enable the virus software so that I can test it. It may be Monday before they respond though.

Thanks for the quick reply and I'll post an answer as soon as I know.

The fix above did not work, but I did find out what the problem is.

Many of the default system message subject lines, in DNN 2.1.2, contain blank lines. All I needed to do to fix the problem was to remove these blank lines. I'm not sure why the blank lines were in with this version, but I urge everyone to remove them, if you want DNN to be able to send to all e-mail servers.

And could they be removed in the next release?

Could you just clarify what you mean by blank lines. Was it the linebreaks between the value nodes i.e. you changed

<value>


[Portal:PortalName] New User Registration


</value>

to

<value>[Portal:PortalName] New User Registration</value>

Thanks,
Cathal

If you look at the 'Systemmessages' table using Enterprise Manager. There is some kind of blank line or CR before most of the messages in the 'MessageValue' field. I found that getting rid of that blank line in the SQL table solved the problem.

Hope that helps,
Brett

thanks Brett, I'll add that to the bugtracker so it gets fixed in the next release.

Cathal

FYI... I just discovered this same problem on my servers. The email server is using the Symantec Anti-Virus engine and it kicks out the following messages to the event log when it sees a DNN email :

Warning, "A mail policy violation has been detected. --> c:\imail\spool\filename.smd : Malformed Container (File not scanned)"

I'm going to try the previous suggestions to see if that lets the messages pass through (currently getting deleted as viruses).

This is a followup to my earlier message where I had indicated that my anti-virus scanner (Symantec) was catching DNN email as viruses because of malformed containers...

I have made the following call in my SQL Server DNN datatabases, and the problem has cleared up.

update systemmessages
set messagevalue = substring(messagevalue, 3, 4000)
where substring(messagevalue, 1, 2) = char(13)+char(10)

FYI
In dnn 3.0 the systemmessages are now part of the static localization and so are stored in .resx files rather than in the database, so this issue should no longer occur.

Cathal

thanks, I'll try it.

Nice solution.... to a problem I have too.

But I do run my DNN on an access DB.
How can I do the changes to solve this problem?