30333 - subject and sender fields are blank

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect, P3)

Description

[cforde]

It appears that Mailnews isn't correctly parsing multipart/mixed MIME types. The
subject and sender fields are blank and selecting such a message to read leaves
the message pane blank too. I'll attach a zip containing Blanks, Blanks.msf (the
mail folder files) and Blanks.gif which shows the interface presentation.

I suspect that these messages might be the initial cause of bug 30065 (each time
I get another one the unread count goes up by 1).

This is with build 2000030308.

Comment 1

[cforde]

Attachment: mail folder files & gif showing the problem

Comment 2

[rhp (gone)]

I'm pretty sure we deal with multipart/mixed messages :-) I have hundreds of 
them in my mail folders. The attachment seems to be a GIF file only...I really 
need your mail folder (NOT THE .MSF FILE) but the mail folder itself.

- rhp

Comment 3

[cforde]

Attachment: mail folder, msf file and gif

Comment 4

[cforde]

Ooops, missed. Have now attached correct file. sorry 'bout that.

Comment 5

[rhp (gone)]

I see the problem. These messages all have headers that are mangled badly. Are 
you getting them from some kind of gateway? MIME Compliant messages need to 
have the "multipart/mixed" tag followed by some sort of "Boundary=" line. If 
you look at the message headers in this mail folder, you will see:

X-Lotus-FromDomain: IBMDE
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/mixed;
X-Mozilla-Status: 8001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-UIDL: b3ac305700000004

 Boundary="0__=bph5mIWWDWn0NuAXkvAsdPnIv1lWud5X2G7dc57cDb8dP6srN82rwPhI"
Content-Disposition: inline

That "Boundary" line should be directly after the Content-Type line. It is a 
continuation line because of the way it is indented. But in these folders, you 
can see they all follow about 5 lines after the Content-Type line and they 
follow a blank line so all is ignored. 

This is really a server/gateway problem. I'll look at what I can do, but I've 
very reluctant to hack to make this work.

- rhp

Comment 6

[rhp (gone)]

Another way these are mangled is the blank line in the middle of the message 
headers. A blank line says "the message headers are complete", then we hit more 
header lines. Ugh!

- rhp

Comment 7

[rhp (gone)]

I did some more investigation by importing these messages into Outlook to see 
how it behaved. It pretty much behaved the same way.

Sorry, I don't think I can do much to fix this.

- rhp

Comment 8

[cforde]

I've sent an extract of the headers like you've shown me to one of the people
sending these badly formatted mails and echoed your concerns. I've asked him to
forward it to the mail agent authors. With any luck they'll fix it.

Comment 9

[lchiang]

[e-mail] - ok to mark verified invalid?  Thanks.

Comment 10

[cforde]

that's fine. You don't have to determine what are headers and what is content.
There are RFCs for that...

Comment 11

[lchiang]

.

Comment 12

[Josh Birnbaum]

*** Bug 306501 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***