Occcaisonally reports of BAD HEADER

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 90

I sent yesterday a newsletter to my 1000 members with valid email address. But approx 2 persons did not receive the newsletter, due to bad header. I got this error report from a mail server:

The message WAS NOT relayed to:
<v-01010@mail.com>:
554 5.6.0 Reject, id=20719-13 - BAD_HEADER: Non-encoded 8-bit data (char E5 hex): Subject: Nyhetsbrev fr\345n [...]

This nondelivery report was generated by the program amavisd-new at host
mail.com. Our internal reference code for your message is
20719-13/5oNblCLlp4hX

INVALID HEADER

Non-encoded 8-bit data (char E5 hex): Subject: Nyhetsbrev fr\345n [...]

The offending character was the Swedish national character å, but two other also exists äö. Other languages can also have similar problems like Nowegian, Danish and German.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 965

Unfortunately, multi-language is not my strong suite. But, see if this thread helps:

http://montegoscripts.com/ftopict-81.html

Maybe UTF-8 can help?

If not, you may want to try using the TegoNuke(tm) Mailer with SMTP option and see if SwiftMailer (which handles the email header creation in the Mailer) handles this better.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 90

I solved the problem by omitting Swedish national characters in the subject line and translated Newletter from to The newsletter -
This worked without any problems.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 965

Most excellent. Thanks for letting me know.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 90

I now discovered that identical error message occurs in the notifications emails from phpbb forum. The error message is made by the antivirus program Amavis of the web hotel. In another post I have read that the subject line of the program have to be changed and here is the code suggested for phpbb.

Code:

http://www.phpbb2.de/dload.php/archive/ftopic42416.html

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 965

Thank you for sharing this as others may find this useful. BTW, I am pretty sure that TegoNuke(tm) Mailer, which uses SwiftMailer, will handle this given that its claim is full RFC support in all areas of mailing.

My intent is to incorporate the Mailer into future versions of the Newsletter if I can ever get to them. Sad

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 90

Will TegoNuke(tm) Mailer also take care of the mailing from the forum or is it just the newsletter? I have 7.6 with patch 3.3.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 965

Ah, you are right, it does NOT. However, that is a planned upgrade. Glad you asked as I had forgotten. Sorry.

The reason is that the primary reason I had for creating the Mailer was just to get around the issue of hosts turning off PHP mail() function, therefore, requiring folks to use SMTP. Since phpBB already could do this, I didn't integrate.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 90

I have found an patch for emailer.php for the forum thats works:

Code:

--- includes/emailer.php.orig 2004-11-18 15:02:11.000000000 -0500
+++ includes/emailer.php 2005-04-23 23:03:12.000000000 -0400
@@ -194,6 +194,14 @@
// Build header
$this->extra_headers = (($this->reply_to != '') ? "Reply-to: $this->reply_to\n" : '') . (($this->from != '') ? "From: $this->from\n" : "From: " . $board_config['board_email'] . "\n") . "Return-Path: " . $board_config['board_email'] . "\nMessage-ID: <" . md5(uniqid(time())) . "@" . $board_config['server_name'] . ">\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-type: text/plain; charset=" . $this->encoding . "\nContent-transfer-encoding: 8bit\nDate: " . date('r', time()) . "\nX-Priority: 3\nX-MSMail-Priority: Normal\nX-Mailer: PHP\nX-MimeOLE: Produced By phpBB2\n" . $this->extra_headers . (($cc != '') ? "Cc: $cc\n" : '') . (($bcc != '') ? "Bcc: $bcc\n" : '');

+ $res = array();
+ foreach (explode("\n", $this->extra_headers) as $hdr)
+ array_push($res, $this->encode_nonascii($hdr));
+ $this->extra_headers = implode("\n", $res);
+
+ $to = $this->encode_nonascii($to);
+ $this->subject = $this->encode_nonascii($this->subject);
+
// Send message ... removed $this->encode() from subject for time being
if ( $this->use_smtp )
{
@@ -237,6 +245,18 @@
return true;
}

+ function encode_nonascii($str)
+ {
+ $res = array();
+ foreach (explode(' ', $str) as $blk)
+ {
+ if (!preg_match("/^[\x21-\x7f]*$/", $blk))
+ $blk = $this->encode($blk);
+ array_push($res, $blk);
+ }
+ return implode(' ', $res);
+ }
+
// Encodes the given string for proper display for this encoding ... nabbed
// from php.net and modified. There is an alternative encoding method which
// may produce lesd output but it's questionable as to its worth in this
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a small bug though. If the subject line contains two adjacent words with Swedish national characters like sömn här they are written sömnhär without space between the words. I found the patch here:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=284361&p=1542972&hilit=8bit+header#p1542972

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 965

Once again, thank you so much for sharing your findings. This may help someone else someday.