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

[Steven Enderle]

Hello Timo!

yes, Mozilla and Netscape are almost the same. There is hardly any 
difference except logos and instant messaging and stuff...

I will sniff the communication as soon as i have time to install a sniffer.

 > 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.

There are two other programms working with the mbox directly (postfix 
though procmail and popa3d - popa3d never at the same time as dovecot), 
but the corruption also happens in my subfolders, where only dovecot is 
working.

 > 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.

I just had some heavy problems with email attachments. It saved just a 
few bytes of my attachments, sometimes 5KB or 20KB of 66KB, sometimes it 
saved a null file. i can't really say why, but that happened again and 
again, i had to open netscape and forward the mail to my second 
workstation without doing something else or i had to restart netscape 
completly (e.g. when opening the attachment for reading or saving it). 
What makes me wondering is, the other workstation is also using the same 
imap server.

Ok, that was another corruption i saw, but i guess its related to the 
corrupted email thing.

Steven
-- 
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----- Steven Enderle ----- m d n Huebner GmbH ----
----- enderle at mdn.de ----- + 49 911 93 90 90 -----
-----  Digital Imaging & Documentmanagment   -----
--------------------------------------------------

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 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.
>