Re: bad (i.e. serious) mail problems

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

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* Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com>  on Tue, 30 Mar 1999
| And IMO it certainly does *not* have to.

Not just your opinion: POP is not allowed to muck with message bodies at
all.

| It (or rather they) is *not* broken. The "\n\nFrom " has special meaning
| *only* for mbox format - not for pop3.

Clarification: the SMTP envelope is of critical importance to SMTP (duh :).
It just so happens that 'mbox' uses the envelope for something else, since
it exist.  It was a stupid decision, but the world is stuck with it.

| When I retrieve mail via pop3 no mbox needs to be involved at all. Again,
| pop3 protocol does *not* require "\n\nFrom " lines to be escaped in any
| way, they do not have any special meaning for it.

Not entirely true.  If the mail host stores mail in mbox-style spool files,
and the MTA or delivery agent does not generate Content-Length headers,
then message body lines that resemble SMTP envelopes should be escaped by
the MTA or local delivery agent on the mail host.  If that does not happen,
the POP server or local mail clients could become confused.

The POP retrieveal mechanism cares not a whit about delimiters on the
server, since the POP server has already done that work.

[...]
| It is the job of whoever builds the mbox to escape things having special
| meaning for mbox (and for nothing else). So, it is gnus (or rather,
| pop3-movemail) who screws things up in this case, because it
| (pop3-movemail) builds an invalid mbox out of perfectly valid separate
| messages.

FYI, pop3-movemail (and the rest of the innards of the code) generate a
crashbox that is identical to the spool file on the server (or as close as
I can get given a certain university's widely used POP server that has a
tendency to strip trailing whitespace from messages).  If the mail host
uses MMDF, an MMDF crashbox is generated.  If the mail host uses Babyl, a
Babyl crashbox is generated.  If the mail host uses mbox, an mbox crashbox
is generated.

The only time pop3 generates an mbox-style crashbox is if the mail host
uses none of these formats and/or the POP server is broken and strips away
the message delimiters.  Then, and only then, will pop3 generate an SMTP
envelope style delimiter derrived from RFC 822 headers.  And I have put
much effort into making sure that the envelope-like delimiter is 100%
accurate in format.  Look at pop3-munge-message-separator for specifics.

If after all that Gnus' spool file parsing code still barfs on a particular
message, it means that the MTA or delivery agent on the mail host failed to
either generate a Content-Length header or escape the envelope-like line.

If that is not the case (show us the Content-Length header in that
message), then you have stumbled onto a Genuine Bug in Gnus.
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