I'm running into a problem with a NAGIOS system sending emails to a popular email-to-SMS service. The email-to-SMS service takes emails with text in the Subject: line, and sends them on to the mobile number encoded in the To: field. So far so good. Sadly, sendmail (and postfix before it) seem to be inserting a gratuitous CRLF into the (necessarily long) Subject: line, and that's causing my SMS messages to be truncated at the CRLF if and only if the Subject: line contains one or more colons past the gratuitous CRLF.

I am confident that the messages are being created correctly, but just to be sure, here's me creating a completely noddy test message to myself, with a long Subject: line:

echo "foo" | mail -s "1234567 101234567 201234567 301234567 401234567 501234567 601234567 701234567 801234567 90123456789" [email protected]

Note there's no extra colon in this Subject: line; all I'm doing here is showing that an extra CRLF is inserted on the wire. Here's the result of sudo ngrep -x port 25:


44 61 74 65 3a 20 46 72    69 2c 20 33 31 20 4d 61    Date: Fri, 31 Ma
79 20 32 30 31 33 20 31    30 3a 34 33 3a 35 35 20    y 2013 10:43:55
2b 30 31 30 30 0d 0a 54    6f 3a 20 72 65 61 70 65    +0100..To: reape
72 40 74 65 61 70 61 72    74 79 2e 6e 65 74 0d 0a    [email protected]..
53 75 62 6a 65 63 74 3a    20 31 32 33 34 35 36 37    Subject: 1234567
20 31 30 31 32 33 34 35    36 37 20 32 30 31 32 33     101234567 20123
34 35 36 37 20 33 30 31    32 33 34 35 36 37 20 34    4567 301234567 4
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37    20 35 30 31 32 33 34 35    01234567 5012345
36 37 0d 0a 20 36 30 31    32 33 34 35 36 37 20 37    67.. 601234567 7
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37    20 38 30 31 32 33 34 35    01234567 8012345
36 37 20 39 30 31 32 33    34 35 36 37 38 39 0d 0a    67 90123456789..
55 73 65 72 2d 41 67 65    6e 74 3a 20 48 65 69 72    User-Agent: Heir
6c 6f 6f 6d 20 6d 61 69    6c 78 20 31 32 2e 34 20    loom mailx 12.4
37 2f 32 39 2f 30 38 0d    0a 4d 49 4d 45 2d 56 65    7/29/08..MIME-Ve
72 73 69 6f 6e 3a 20 31    2e 30 0d 0a 43 6f 6e 74    rsion: 1.0..Cont
65 6e 74 2d 54 79 70 65    3a 20 74 65 78 74 2f 70    ent-Type: text/p
6c 61 69 6e 3b 20 63 68    61 72 73 65 74 3d 75 73    lain; charset=us

About half way down (marked in bold+italic), between the 501234567 and the 601234567 in the original Subject: header, you can see a CRLF being inserted (0x0d 0x0a, on the left-hand side hex dump, .. on the right-hand side plain text).

The receiving MTA seems happy to post-process this, and when I look at the on-disc stored mail at the receiving end, I see only a LF (0x0a) in the Subject: line, and the line is parsed correctly and in its entirety by, eg, alpine. Nevertheless, the CRLF is there on the wire, and between me and the (excellent) email-to-SMS support people, we've established that these are the cause of the problem.

So my question is: is it lawful for an MTA to insert a gratuitous CRLF on the wire?

If it is, and I can prove it, then it's the email-to-SMS house's problem, because they are being intolerant. If it isn't, or it is but I can't prove it, then it becomes my problem, so an answer with references would be most useful.

Edit: I can now come clean that the email-to-SMS service in question is kapow. Once this problem was explained to them, they got it, worked with me to develop and test a fix, and have deployed the fix. My long subject lines with colons in now get relayed correctly into SMSes. I don't normally trumpet individual companies, especially not on SF, but I thought it worthy of note that kapow Did The Right Thing. (Disclaimer: I have no connection with kapow except as a paying customer who's happy about the way they dealt with his problem.)