[Dovecot] mbox From escaping implementation ?
Hello,
I read in the wiki (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/mbox) about "From Escaping":
"Dovecot doesn't currently do this escaping however. Instead it prevents this confusion by adding Content-Length headers so it knows later where the next message begins. Dovecot doesn't either remove the '>' characters before sending the data to clients. Both of these will probably be implemented later."
As I understand it, this makes the mbox format of dovecot slightly incompatible with other mbox-capable clients, because if they read the data files directly, they may understand a line starting with an unescaped 'From ' as the start of a new message. Right ?
Are there any plans to implement this escaping in the future (1.1.x or 2.0.x?)
Thanks,
Nicolas
On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 11:30 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
Hello,
I read in the wiki (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/mbox) about "From Escaping":
"Dovecot doesn't currently do this escaping however. Instead it prevents this confusion by adding Content-Length headers so it knows later where the next message begins. Dovecot doesn't either remove the '>' characters before sending the data to clients. Both of these will probably be implemented later."
As I understand it, this makes the mbox format of dovecot slightly incompatible with other mbox-capable clients, because if they read the data files directly, they may understand a line starting with an unescaped 'From ' as the start of a new message. Right ?
Maybe. I got this Content-Length: idea originally from mutt which also uses (used? don't know) Content-Length: instead of From-escaping.
Are there any plans to implement this escaping in the future (1.1.x or 2.0.x?)
It's a very low priority for me. The Content-Length: usage has actually been completely broken in all v1.0 releases and only a couple of people ever noticed it. I finally fixed it in v1.1 some weeks ago.
Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi writes:
On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 11:30 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
As I understand it, this makes the mbox format of dovecot slightly incompatible with other mbox-capable clients, because if they read the data files directly, they may understand a line starting with an unescaped 'From ' as the start of a new message. Right ?
Just for the record, I found this page, http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html which explains the multiple mbox formats available. I was not aware of this before. Finally, Maildir is the solution...
Maybe. I got this Content-Length: idea originally from mutt which also uses (used? don't know) Content-Length: instead of From-escaping.
Described in the above page as "The mboxcl2 mailbox format".
Are there any plans to implement this escaping in the future (1.1.x or 2.0.x?)
It's a very low priority for me. The Content-Length: usage has actually been completely broken in all v1.0 releases and only a couple of people ever noticed it. I finally fixed it in v1.1 some weeks ago.
Thanks for your reply Timo.
Regards,
Nicolas
On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 13:21 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi writes:
On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 11:30 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
As I understand it, this makes the mbox format of dovecot slightly incompatible with other mbox-capable clients, because if they read the data files directly, they may understand a line starting with an unescaped 'From ' as the start of a new message. Right ?
Just for the record, I found this page, http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html which explains the multiple mbox formats available. I was not aware of this before. Finally, Maildir is the solution...
Maybe. I got this Content-Length: idea originally from mutt which also uses (used? don't know) Content-Length: instead of From-escaping.
Described in the above page as "The mboxcl2 mailbox format".
Pretty much yes, except Dovecot is able to handle missing or broken Content-Length: headers.
participants (2)
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Nicolas KOWALSKI
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Timo Sirainen