[Dovecot] Bug report: "doveadm rename" encodes special characters wrongly in mUTF-7 (in fs)

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Sat Sep 21 05:14:20 EEST 2013


On 20.9.2013, at 17.42, megodin at inboxalias.com wrote:

> So when using "doveadm rename" trying to rename a folder with special characters e.g. german umlauts like "ä" it seems to create the folder wrongly in the filesystem.
> 
> Example: When I want to rename a users folder 'geschaftliches' to 'gesch&AOQ-ftliches' ("&AOQ-" is the correct mUTF-7 encoding for "ä") using the command

Forget about mUTF-7 with Dovecot. It's an IMAP-protocol relic, and Dovecot is trying to get rid of it in as many places as possible. Although by default the filesystem users mUTF-7, but that can also be changed with a setting.

> (Apparently "doveadm rename" supports only UTF-8 which shows up when trying to rename the folder with 
> "doveadm mailbox rename -u user 'geschäftliches'" I get the error message "Fatal: Mailbox name not valid UTF-8: geschäftliches")

I suspect your shell is breaking the 8bit chars into invalid UTF-8. I just tried and it works fine with me.

> To get things worse, when renaming the mailfolder in Thunderbird to "geschäftliches" it gets correctly written in the filesystem as "gesch&AOQ-ftliches" - but afterwards it's NOT found anymore in the dovecot index, e.g. when trying 
> doveadm force-resync -u user
> it is not listed anymore (until back-renaming in fs to the name it was indexed before).

Folders aren't indexed by default (mailbox_list_index=no) and force-resync doesn't affect them. Are you saying "doveadm mailbox list -u user" doesn't show some folder? I'm not aware of any bugs related to this.

> This problem can be reproduced. Can you please fix this? 

I'd need to get some more specifics. Show show exists in filesystems and what commands don't produce expected results (and what they produce instead).

> (Not sure if this might change - maybe add an option to support UTF-7 similar to doveadm mailbox list "-7" option)

Nah, mUTF-7 hopefully will die some day.



More information about the dovecot mailing list