mailscanner died unexpectedly because of eval in taint mode

[Oliver Siegmar]

Binary package hint: mailscanner

After upgrading from jaunty to lucid my mailscanner dies when constructing a warning message.

When launching mailscanner with debug enabled, I get this:

In Debugging mode, not forking...
Trying to setlogsock(unix)
Building a message batch to scan...
Have a batch of 1 message.
Insecure dependency in eval while running with -T switch at /usr/share/MailScanner//MailScanner/Message.pm line 4239, <GEN63> line 1.
Insecure dependency in eval while running with -T switch at /usr/share/MailScanner//MailScanner/Message.pm line 4239, <GEN63> line 1.

It is the ConstructWarning sub in /usr/share/MailScanner/MailScanner/Message.pm - line 4239 is:

$result = eval "\"$line\"";

As soon as a new infected mail is scanned, mailscanner enters an endless loop - no messages are processed anymore. The instance dies and is being respawned over and over again.

[Oliver Siegmar (osiegmar)]

I could work around this problem by adding a '--chuid Debian-exim' parameter to the start-stop-daemon call in /etc/init.d/mailscanner -

start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --nicelevel $run_nice --chuid Debian-exim --exec $DAEMON --name $NAME -- $DAEMON_ARGS \
    || return 2

I could also find more people having the same problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313599
http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-spamsnake-ubuntu-jaunty-jackalope
http://www.bluequartz.us/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=108939

The problem seems to be, that the mailscanner version used in karmic and lucid is not compatible with Perl 5.10

[Didier Conchaudron (dcn)]

I'm running Lucid in server mode and am getting similar issue. Debug mode dropped the following:

In Debugging mode, not forking...
Trying to setlogsock(unix)
Building a message batch to scan...
Have a batch of 2 messages.
max message size is '200k'
max message size is '200k'
Insecure dependency in chown while running with -T switch at /usr/share/MailScanner//MailScanner/Message.pm line 2407.

Your pointed fix works for the moment. Many thanks!