Question
I occasionally get sent a message which has no message body, i.e. it contains headers immediately followed by a terminating dot.
When my pop client attempts to retreive such a message it hangs and is unable to download any further mail.
Answer
This is a problem with the mail client being used. Messages with no body are completely compliant with the relevant RFC’s.
Having said that the majority of such messages are produced by spammers simply looking to see if your email address exists and accepts mail.
To do this they connect to SMTP and send mail directly using the SMTP protocol. They tend not to insert any From or To clauses so by default GMS inserts these for you, and also includes an X-Fixed header to indicate it has done so.
To change this default behaviour please log into the administration interface and go to Administration > Mail > System > Compliance, check the option Enforce RFC 822 header and then click on Update.
Any future messages that arive without the appropriate RFC headers will be rejected. These are From, To, Date and Subject.
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