[Dovecot] Dovecot and Mulberry

[Kenneth Porter]

FYI. Does Dovecot implement BODYSTRUCTURE?

An eval copy of Mulberry can be downloaded from 
<http://www.cyrusoft.com/mulberry/>.

------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 6:56 PM +0100
From: Lennart Petersson <lennart at informatik.gu.se>
To: mulberry-discuss at cyrusoft.com
Subject: Dovecot and Mulberry

I've recently changed my imap-server from Courier to Dovecot
<http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/> for testing purposes and have seen some
strange behaviour from Mulberry.

Most annoying is that suddenly some incoming mail are parsed wrong, i.e.
even if the mail has has proper Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1" and
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable, it is displayed as 7bit and
us-ascii. All these =F6 and so on is irritating. The only way remedy the
problem is to quit mulberry and start again and almost always the email is
displayed properly. And if the mail that gets misinterpreted is a
multi-part email mulberry only reports that it has one part. But if you
view the mail in raw all the parts are there. I've yet to see a pattern in
then mulberry starts this misinterpretations. Sometimes it is a email from
pine or a mail from a mailinglist or from outlook or ...

A collegue that also uses dovecot but mutt instead of mulberry doesn't have
this problems. Should I blame Dovecot or Mulberry?

Anyone one with experience with dovecot (or any other imap-server that
supports Maildirs)?


Lennart
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------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 1:12 PM -0500
From: Cyrus Daboo <daboo at cyrusoft.com>
To: Lennart Petersson <lennart at informatik.gu.se>, 
mulberry-discuss at cyrusoft.com
Subject: Re: Dovecot and Mulberry

Hi Lennart,

--On Tuesday, February 10, 2004 6:56 PM +0100 Lennart Petersson
<lennart at informatik.gu.se> wrote:

| A collegue that also uses dovecot but mutt instead of mulberry doesn't
| have this problems. Should I blame Dovecot or Mulberry?
|
| Anyone one with experience with dovecot (or any other imap-server that
| supports Maildirs)?

If you see problems with proper interpretation of MIME structure and MIME
parameters etc, then it is almost certainly a server bug. Mulberry uses the
IMAP server's BODYSTRUCTURE response to determine the MIME structure of a
message on the server without having to download the entire message and
parse it locally - that is one of the major benefits of IMAP. The details
you see listed in the mailbox pane (addresses, subject, attachment types)
and the parts listed in the message pane's Parts list are all derived from
the server response. If the server gets it wrong, then you will see the
incorrect data/structure in Mulberry too. To confirm that it really is a
server bug, try copying the message to a local Mulberry mailbox and look at
it from the local mailbox. It should appear correctly in that case, because
Mulberry will do MIME parsing itself for local messages.

To fully diagnose this, put the problem messages in their own IMAP mailbox,
then turn protocol logging for IMAP on in Mulberry using
<http://www.cyrusoft.com/mulberry/faq/logging.html> and open the mailbox to
show the list of message. Then turn logging off and send me (or inspect
yourself) the log files.

NB Clients that do not take advantage of IMAP's benefits by using
BODYSTRUCTURE (and other similar features) will not 'expose' the server bug
as they never use that data from the server.

PS Getting the BODYSTRUCTURE response wrong is the most common server bug
that we see - particularly in relatively new servers.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo
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