[ILUG] SA MISSING_MIME_HB_SEP rule

Thu Feb 21 12:59:29 GMT 2008

I have a problem where a customer sends out a newsletter which in at  
least one case (apparently a friend of somebody who works in their  
office :-( ) is not getting to its destination because it's  rejected  
due to SA rules - it gets 12.5 points, and they reject at 10.

There are various rules triggered, some of which I can do something  
about, others not. But the one which puzzles me is:

2.7 MISSING_MIME_HB_SEP

The SA wiki explains this rule thus:

The format for e-mail requires a blank line between the headers and  
the body of a message, the lack of one causes this rule to fire. This  
rule is quite expensive to hit, so I guess it's one spam often fails.  
However, looking at a sample of the newsletter email, I see this
(## lines are explanations by me for missing chunks)

## LOTS OF HEADER LINES ##
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
  boundary="alternative_boundary"
Message-ID: <auto-000004804511 at host6.makalumedia.com>

--alternative_boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Lieber Musik-Fan,

## LOTS OF TEXT BODY LINES ##

--alternative_boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

     <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"  
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

## LOTS OF HTML BODY LINES ##

This appears to me to have the requisite blank line after each set of  
headers - the mail headers, and each body part's headers.

Can anybody suggest what I'm missing? Should I maybe just toss in  
ANOTHER blank line?

Niall