Question
The SMTP service appears to silently close down. There is nothing in the log to indicate it has stopped but it is no longer possible to connect to it.
Querying the state of the Services via the Service Manager indicates that the SMTP service is not running.
Answer
The problem is caused by an incoming message where the very last line of the body of the message ends with at least three NULL characters immediately adjacent to each other.
This is caused by an issue with the handling of NULL characters in the message content scanner. The issue will only affect those systems where the System Variable "VScanActivate" has a value of 1.
A hotfix release of the message content scanner was built and released to customers on 23-May-02. The hotfix can be obtained from our ftp site h20020523.
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Keywords:SMTP stopping enod of messge eom