I'm just forwarding this verbatim from somebody who works here. Comments ?

mm

----- Forwarded message from Dave Chamberlain davec@mv.mv.com -----

Subject: possible dovecot problem From: "Dave Chamberlain" davec@mv.mv.com Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 21:29:48 -0400 (EDT) To: mem@mv.mv.com (Mark E. Mallett)

Ok, I'm kind of confused at what dovecot's imap implementation is doing.

I seem to be spending more time than I need to correctly decipher the headers of email messages.

I have included here the text from 7.4.2 as it explains the response from a fetch of an ENVELOPE. The last paragraph specifies that the FROM, SENDER and REPLYTO fields cannot be nil because some of them must be present per RFC822 and the IMAP spec will default values. I have many examples where this is not the case, where the fetch of the envelope is returning NIL for some of these values.

In the example below, the message shows that the from, replyto and sender are all set to jaentc@aukware.com (ok, a spelling error, but that was her typing it in wrong). The next field after those three is NIL, that is the TO line (more of my text after the IMAP conversation)

a uid fetch 902 ENVELOPE

• 113 EXISTS
• 1 RECENT
• 104 FETCH (UID 902 ENVELOPE ("Tue, 20 May 2003 16:05:04 -0500" "From A Friend: 'TheWMURChannel.com - News - Law Raises Age Children Must Be In Seat Restraints'" (("Janet" NIL "jaentc" "aukware.com")) (("Janet" NIL "jaentc" "aukware.com")) (("Janet" NIL "jaentc" "aukware.com")) NIL NIL NIL NIL "200305202105.h4KL5xo20860@qbert.ibsys.com"))

Following is the complete header from the message. There is a valid To address supplied, and it is in one of the allowed formats. I would have thought that possibly it was the format that was causing the problem. I first theorized that it didn't understand the emailaddress (personalname) format. However, the From field is in that format, and was correctly picked up (notice that "Janet" exists above as the Personal name, so it did understand that format).

I have found multple cases where the FROM was NIL, the SUBJECT was NIL and the TO is NIL, yet when looking at the header they are visible.

This is causing problems with more than just my things, OE is having a problem with it as well.

...

From jaentc@aukware.com Tue May 20 21:26:43 2003 UTC Received: (qmail 24772 invoked from network); 20 May 2003 17:52:17 -0400 Received: from iridium.mv.net (HELO mv.mv.com) (qmailr@199.125.85.17) by mercury.mv.net with SMTP; 20 May 2003 17:52:17 -0400 X-Peer-Info: remote-ip 199.125.85.17 local-ip 199.125.85.40 local-name mercury.mv.net Received: (qmail 21564 invoked by uid 134); 20 May 2003 17:26:53 -0400 Delivered-To: davec@mv.com Received: (qmail 3533 invoked from network); 20 May 2003 17:06:26 -0400 Received: from qbert.ibsys.com (66.187.197.24) by iridium.mv.net with SMTP; 20 May 2003 17:06:26 -0400 X-Peer-Info: remote-ip 66.187.197.24 local-ip 199.125.85.17 local-name iridium.mv.net Received: from 10.0.0.24 (cfusion3.ibsys.com [10.3.0.53]) by qbert.ibsys.com (Switch-2.1.0/Switch-2.1.0) with ESMTP id h4KL5xo20860 for Tue, 20 May 2003 16:05:59 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: 200305202105.h4KL5xo20860@qbert.ibsys.com Content-type: text/plain Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:05:04 -0500 From: jaentc@aukware.com (Janet) Subject: From A Friend: 'TheWMURChannel.com - News - Law Raises Age Children Must Be In Seat Restraints' To: davec@mv.com (Dave)

Section 7.4.2

  ENVELOPE
     A parenthesized list that describes the envelope structure of a
     message.  This is computed by the server by parsing the
     [RFC-2822] header into the component parts, defaulting various
     fields as necessary.

     The fields of the envelope structure are in the following
     order: date, subject, from, sender, reply-to, to, cc, bcc,
     in-reply-to, and message-id.  The date, subject, in-reply-to,
     and message-id fields are strings.  The from, sender, reply-to,
     to, cc, and bcc fields are parenthesized lists of address
     structures.

     An address structure is a parenthesized list that describes an
     electronic mail address.  The fields of an address structure
     are in the following order: personal name, [SMTP]
     at-domain-list (source route), mailbox name, and host name.

     [RFC-2822] group syntax is indicated by a special form of
     address structure in which the host name field is NIL.  If the
     mailbox name field is also NIL, this is an end of group marker
     (semi-colon in RFC 822 syntax).  If the mailbox name field is
     non-NIL, this is a start of group marker, and the mailbox name
     field holds the group name phrase.

     If the Date, Subject, In-Reply-To, and Message-ID header lines
     are absent in the [RFC-2822] header, the corresponding member
     of the envelope is NIL; if these header lines are present but
     empty the corresponding member of the envelope is the empty
     string.

        Note: some servers may return a NIL envelope member in the
        "present but empty" case.  Clients SHOULD treat NIL and
        empty string as identical.

        Note: [RFC-2822] requires that all messages have a valid
        Date header.  Therefore, the date member in the envelope can
        not be NIL or the empty string.

        Note: [RFC-2822] requires that the In-Reply-To and
        Message-ID headers, if present, have non-empty content.
        Therefore, the in-reply-to and message-id members in the
        envelope can not be the empty string.

     If the From, To, cc, and bcc header lines are absent in the
     [RFC-2822] header, or are present but empty, the corresponding
     member of the envelope is NIL.

     If the Sender or Reply-To lines are absent in the [RFC-2822]
     header, or are present but empty, the server sets the
     corresponding member of the envelope to be the same value as
     the from member (the client is not expected to know to do
     this).

        Note: [RFC-2822] requires that all messages have a valid
        From header.  Therefore, the from, sender, and reply-to
        members in the envelope can not be NIL.

----- End forwarded message -----