Sendmail not parsing colons, rancid not finding sendmail

[vanGrimoire]

Hello,


I've tested sendmail from the commandline and found that I can send email if it does not contain a colon.
For example:

sendmail user@mailserver.com << EOF
Hello, this is a test email.
EOF

works, but this:

sendmail user@mailserver.com << EOF
Subject: Test email
This is a test email.subject: hello what!
EOF

sendmail: command failed: 550 5.7.1 Delivery not authorized, message refused: Message is not RFC 2822 compliant

does not.

Thanks in advance.

[jggimi]

I see one issue here in your test, and one in the sendmail(1) man page.

Here: your second Email is not RFC 2822 compliant. The colon is considered a header field delimiter (RFC 2822 section 2.2) and not part of the message body.

There: the man page says: "The sendmail enqueuer is not intended to be used directly to send mail, but rather via a frontend known as a mail user agent."