what was that?

[Jacques A. Vidrine]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 09:18:08PM +0400, Nikolaj I. Potanin wrote:
> What does mean this bizarre msgid?
> 
> maillog:
> Mar 31 19:31:15 cu sm-mta[5352]: h2VFVEGS005352: from=<nb at sindbad.ru>, 
> size=1737, class=0, nrcpts=1, 
> msgid=<!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAAAfp4Fa2ShPE2u4pP/QpPDIMKAAAAQAAAAj+zb4Isbuk+tYEPVF9Vf, 
> proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=wg.pu.ru [193.124.85.219]


It was a long Message-ID which sendmail truncated to 100 characters
when printing the log message, i.e. printf(...  msgid=%.100s ...). 

It's kind of interesting, because it is base64 encoded data which
begins with the string `PCDFEB09':

0000  50 43 44 46 45 42 30 39  00 01 00 02 00 00 00 00  |PCDFEB09........|
0010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 18 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
0020  00 7e 9e 05 6b 64 a1 3c  4d ae e2 93 ff 42 93 c3  |.~..kd¡<M®â.ÿB.Ã|
0030  20 c2 80 00 00 10 00 00  00 8f ec db e0 8b 1b ba  | Â........ìÛà..º|
0040  4f ad 60 43 d5 17 d5 5f                           |O­`CÕ.Õ_|

Google'ing for that string turns up a lot of hits, which seem to be
Microsoft TNEF attachements.  *shrug*  Perhaps it is a sneaky way of
sending some data out-of-band :-) or maybe it is just a buggy
application.  Too bad you don't have the entire message.

I don't think it is anything to worry about, really.

Cheers,
-- 
Jacques A. Vidrine <nectar at celabo.org>          http://www.celabo.org/
NTT/Verio SME          .     FreeBSD UNIX     .       Heimdal Kerberos
jvidrine at verio.net     .  nectar at FreeBSD.org  .          nectar at kth.se