Two security vulnerabilities were discovered in Heirloom mailx, an implementation of the mail command: CVE-2004-2771 mailx interprets interprets shell meta-characters in certain email addresses. CVE-2014-7844 An unexpected feature of mailx treats syntactically valid email addresses as shell commands to execute. Shell command execution can be re-enabled using the expandaddr option. Note that this security update does not remove all mailx facilities for command execution, though. Scripts which send mail to addresses obtained from an untrusted source (such as a web form) should use the -- separator before the email addresses (which was fixed to work properly in this update), or they should be changed to invoke mail -t or sendmail -i -t instead, passing the recipient addresses as part of the mail header.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 12.5-2+deb7u1. We recommend that you upgrade your heirloom-mailx packages.

Workalike of the classical mail(1). Heirloom mailx can produce and read MIME and S/MIME messages and has greatly improved character-set handling, including support for UTF-8.

heirloom-mailx on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3105.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25