Bug#790616: exim4: exim crashes when sending email to more then one recipient

[Giacomo Mulas]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, Andreas Metzler wrote:

> On 2015-06-30 Giacomo Mulas <gmulas at oa-cagliari.inaf.it> wrote:
>> Package: exim4
>> Version: 4.86~RC4-1
>> Severity: important
>
>> Dear Maintainer,
>
>> Since 2 updates in sid, exim4 crashes (and fails to deliver) whenever
>> attempting to send an email to more than one recipient.
> [...]
>
> Hello Giacomo,
>
> are you able to limit this further, did it break with 4.86~RC3-2 or
> earlier (4.85-3)? (/var/log/apt/history.log or /var/log/dpkg.log might
> help)

I upgraded to 4.85-3 at the end of April, I think I would have noticed this
problem rather quickly, so I would definitely vote for 4.86~RC3-2, which
happened on the 24th of June.  However I cannot be completely sure: since
the problem shows only when sending email to multiple recipients, it is in
principle possible that the problem was unnoticed for a while, but this is
very very unlikely. To be sure about this, I would need to downgrade exim4
to earlier versions and check if the problem is present.

However, as I already said in a previous email, the "culprit" appears to be
sa-exim (which has been unchanged for well over a year), which must have
been broken by some recent ABI change in exim4: just recompiling sa-exim
from its source package against the current exim4-dev and installing the
resulting package (as I did locally) fixes the problem.

checking whether the problem is present is trivial, even from the command
line: just create a dummy text file and issue a command like

$ mail oneemail at some.domain.org,anotheremail at some.domain.org <mydummytext.txt

If you have the broken sa-exim + exim4 combo, this will fail, and you
will get a

local_scan() function crashed with signal 11 - message temporarily rejected (size <some size>)

message on exim's mainlog.

Let me know if I can do something more about this. If you can point me to
some debian archive with previous versions of the exim4 packages, I can do a
bisection to determine exactly which exim4 upgrade broke sa-exim.

Bye
Giacomo

-- 
_________________________________________________________________

Giacomo Mulas <gmulas at oa-cagliari.inaf.it>
_________________________________________________________________

INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari
via della scienza 5 - 09047 Selargius (CA)

tel.   +39 070 71180244
mob. : +39 329  6603810
_________________________________________________________________

"When the storms are raging around you, stay right where you are"
                          (Freddy Mercury)
_________________________________________________________________