110541 - Messages with lines beginning with From get corrupt

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Julien Pierre]

1. at a unix shell, use vi to generate a file like the following. Make sure to
modify your e-mail address

From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]
Subject: test From bug

From Julien

2. cat file | mail [e-mail] (again, mail it to yourself)

3. retrieve your e-mail via POP
4. the message shows as ">From Julien". The ">" character was inserted. This is
due to the mail storage routines which depend on From.

This is a bad bug because it changes the integrity of the message. I have many
times wondered where those ">" came from in the past. I thought people were
making typos, but that wasn't the case, it was because of the database.

Comment 1

[Julien Pierre]

Note that if you are looking at the notification e-mail for this bug in
bugzilla, you will readily see the problem with the From line being converted to
">From" in my sample suggested e-mail :-) If you click on the link to bugzilla
the > is not there.

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

reassigning to bienvenu.  Changing to future unless David thinks this is
something worth fixing that we can fix.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

We have to do this to handle reparsing of folders, because the berkeley mailbox
format uses "From " to separate different messages, so unless you want your
messages broken into parts whenever we have to reparse a folder and see a line
starting with "From " (which would be much much worse than what happens now,
believe me), you'll have to live with ">From ".

Comment 4

[Julien Pierre]

How is this bug "INVALID" ? I believe the bug does exist, the messages are
getting corrupt. If you don't want to fix it, then mark it WONTFIX.
I personally think it is a fundamental flaw that we use From as a separator, and
the mailbox format should be changed not to depend on it. That's why I opened
this defect in the first place.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Every netscape email client since 2.0 used From as a message delimiter. Almost
every unix email client uses From as a message delimiter as does Eudora...I
could go on. It's a standard format that allows our mailboxes to be
interoperable with other e-mail clients.

Comment 6

[Julien Pierre]

I didn't know about the interoperability with other mail programs. Do people
actually take advantage of this compatibility to edit their Netscape mail
folders with other programs ?

IMO, we shouldn't be bug for bug compatible with those programs. Perhaps there
is a relatively harmless way to change the Netscape mailbox format (eg. encode
all the messages containing "From" so the separator word wouldn't show) that
wouldn't completely break compatibility, if it is actually an important feature
of our mail program.