1276139 - TB does not allow adding a text file (mail list archive almost in mbox format) to mail storage manually

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Denis Smirnov]

Attachment: 2014.diff

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160502172042

Steps to reproduce:

Import maxima CAS maillist archives http://def.fe.up.pt/pipermail/maxima-discuss/ by copying them to Mail\Local Folders in Thunderbird profile.


Actual results:

All lists are successfully imported, except 2014


Expected results:

2014.txt should be imported too.
Quick digging shows problems are occuring when word "From" is found after line feed. Simple adding spaces to the beginning of problematic lines "solves" the issue (look at diff).

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

What do you mean by import?

You copy a text file into the TB mail store and expect it to be recognised as Berkeley mailbox?
Well, if the file has the right format, that will work, so to say "by accident".

In the Berkeley mailbox format a line with the word From at the front delimits individual messages. So if you have From at the front within the body of an e-mail, you need to prefix that with space or >.

Sorry, there is nothing we will do about this.

Comment 2

[yup]

(In reply to Jorg K (PTO during summer, NI me) from comment #1)
 
> So if you have From at the front within the
> body of an e-mail, you need to prefix that with space or >.

It's quite boring to an average user - to find all "From " in a huge file, isn't it?

> In the Berkeley mailbox format a line with the word From at the front
> delimits individual messages.

There is one additional sing of a new message start: there is at least one empty line before delimiter.
 
> Sorry, there is nothing we will do about this.

Currently, Thunderbird recognises every line that starts with "From " as a new message. At least it is possible to lower a number of false positives by ignoring "From"s that are not preceded by an empty line.
Obviously, a lines below:
===
Maxima we just built and build it again, this time with the declarations
From the sys-proclaim.lisp. For all the gory details, look in
===
should not be recognized as belonged to different messages.

Comment 3

[yup]

Also I worry about situation when an index file (.msf) of a legitimate Thinderbird's mail folder get corrupted and requires repairing. It sems, this process will suffer from the same problem.

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Putting a text file into TB's e-mail store is not supported. It is not a valid import method.
If you do that, you're on your own since you're messing with the internal structures. So the "non average" user doing this might as well use a text editor or a script to find the "From" lines that need fixing.

If you have a problem with mailbox repair, please raise another bug.