Corrupt address -> message stuck in queue (endless loop)

[Mpellissetti]

Version: mailman-2.0.8-1, on Red Hat Linux 7.2

We transferred email adresses from a Windows-based
program (Filemaker), by exporting them in an ASCII file
(Addresses.txt) and importing them to the mailman list
with:

/var/mailman/bin/remove_members -a Listname;
/var/mailman/bin/add_members -n Addresses.txt Listname

The file Addresses.txt contained one corrupt email
address of the form:
<email address hidden>^Kpers: <email address hidden>

Viewing the file content with od showed the following
exact character sequence (separate characters with one
blank for better viewing):
u s e r 1 @ h o s t . d o m a i n \v p e r s : u s e
r 2 @ h o s t . d o m a i n

Note: The corrupt address was not detected by mailman
when it was imported!

Sending an email to this mailing list caused the
message to be stuck in /var/mailman/qfiles. Since
qrunner is specified in /var/mailman/cron/crontab.in to
be executed every minute, the message was sent out
repeatedly (18 times mailman was killed manually)
basically to the addresses preceding the corrupt one.

The sender of the message received the following error
message per email:
...
  ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal
errors -----
pers:
   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
553 5.1.3 pers:... List:; syntax illegal for recipient
addresses
...

Note: This bug is reproducible.

This behavior denotes poor fault tolerance, I strongly
hope that newer versions behave differently in such a
case. It is always possible that a corrupt address is
being entered, but the consequences (in the described
case) are catastrophic!
(Fortunately one of the approx. 500 recipients replied
quite immediately, so "only" 18 copies of the message
were sent out!)

[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1255548&group_id=103&atid=100103]

[Mpellissetti (mpellissetti)]

Rectification:
After the message got stuck in /var/mailman/qfiles, the
message was sent out
repeatedly (18 times until mailman was killed manually),
basically to the addresses FOLLOWING the corrupt one.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Mailman 2.0.8 is extremely old and no longer supported. If
you upgrade to Mailman 2.1.6 (the current release of the 2.1
branch) and the problem persists, then feel free to open a
new bug report, but please try to include the content of the
offending message so that we can debug it.