[Dovecot] Message display corrupted or missing in Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.3

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 11:54, Steven Enderle wrote:
> a few days ago, we switched our site from pop3 to imap. We are running 
> about 20 users with Netscape 7.0 on a FreeBSD-4.8 Server .

Isn't Netscape 7's mail pretty much the same as Mozilla's mail?

> Now we suffer from a realy ugly problem, which was arising after the 
> switch from pop3. When Netscape is newly started, it works fine as 
> expected until Netscape displays messages corrupted or stops displaying 
> them completly. I also cannot forward them in that state or open or 
> delete them in any other way. The only way to get it working again is to 
> quit Netscape, exit quickstart and restart Netscape again.

Hmm. It might help if you showed what exactly Dovecot was sending to
Netscape. See http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/bugreport.html#sniffing

If it's Dovecot's fault, I can think of only two reasons:

a) Dovecot doesn't detect that mbox was changed and doesn't synchronize
it, and it starts reading messages from wrong location. I haven't
noticed problems with this myself and I've been using Dovecot with mbox
for almost a year now. Maybe some other program touches the mbox in a
way Dovecot doesn't understand.

b) mbox support still doesn't behave fully as IMAP RFC requires. Message
headers may change (not permitted) and so message size may not be
exactly correct (not permitted either). I doubt Netscape really cares
about these though.

Or maybe it's something completely different. I can't say really.

> email starting with header, raw html email and encoded attachment is 
> shown below, each line followed by another blank line, like this:
> 
> == start corrupted email
> X-UIDL: 8793f170f0430909
> 
> Return-Path: <frank.xx at xx.de>

Was there any other corruption than extra empty lines? Is there ever any
other corruption?

> I like dovecot a lot, it was easy to install etc and works pretty fine 
> except that it still seems to be in beta-stage. Now i would switch to 
> courier/uw-imap until dovecot is ready, but the mbox format dovecot is 
> using seems to be pretty uniq? I think, the users could keep their 
> /var/mail/Username-INBOX, but wouldn't they loose their email folders? 
> Is there any way to switch the software in a easy way? Or will there be 
> a near future release which will fix that? What about the cvs version?

You should be able to switch between UW-IMAP and Dovecot easily. Only
difference is that Dovecot saves mailbox subscriptions to
~/mail/.subscriptions and UW-IMAP to ~/.mailboxlist. And also that
Dovecot shows only mailboxes under ~/mail by default, UW-IMAP shows
everything under ~/. The ".imap" directories that Dovecot creates can be
deleted without any data loss.