[Dovecot] 0.99.1[12] IMAP problems with Apple Mail.app?

Jim Tittsler jt at onjapan.net
Fri Dec 31 12:56:01 EET 2004


Is anyone else having trouble using the Apple OS X Mail.app with a 
Dovecot IMAP server?

With 0.99.11 and 0.99.12 attempting to read certain messages using IMAP 
or IMAPS seems to put Mail.app into spinning pizza of death mode.  
Sniffing the connection, it looks like it happens after the client 
issues a BODY.PEEK[] and the server has responded with the (UID XXXX 
BODY[] {YYYY}...) and OK Fetch completed.  I've only been able to catch 
it happening with messages that are either (a) Base64 encoded or (b) 
those that claim to be multi-part/alternative, but only seem to contain 
a single part.  The client acts like it has received the message, since 
if I kill Mail.app and restart it, I am able to read the problem 
message from its cache.  Is this a Mail.app bug?  Is it something about 
the way Dovecot is responding to the BODY.PEEK[] in these cases?

Using Mail.app with the Novell myrealbox.com IMAP I haven't seen 
problem, even with a test problematic message I redirected there, 
although admittedly I'm changing the headers by doing the redirection.

I haven't gotten 0.99.13rc3 to get past the autotools stage of 
complaining about AM_ICONV (and a number of AC_ warnings), so I've yet 
to try it.




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