[Dovecot] mbox From escaping implementation ?

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Tue May 27 13:53:47 EEST 2008


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.

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