Re: Problems with downloads from hotmail

On Wed, 31 Dec 2025, Ian Neal wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I currently use fetchmail 7.0.0-alpha13 running on Fedora 42 to pull emails down from
> hotmail with OAuth2 and delivery to my local dovecot email server.

(I haven't been keeping up with fetchmail 7 as I believed that
  current development was on version 6 and frustration wth GMail
  made it likely that OAuth2 support might not continue.
   For fetchmail 6 I use Matthew Ogilvie's OAuth2 patches:
  https://sourceforge.net/u/mmogilvi/fetchmail/ci/master/tree/ )

> Up until the last few weeks I've not had any issues with downloading emails, but now
> I've started having an issue where an <feff> character gets inserted just before the
> start of the main header (so after the local part inserted by fetchmail).
>
> My fetchmailrc file is along the lines of:
> poll pop-mail.outlook.com proto POP3 port 995 auth oauthbearer username
> "[email protected]" passwordfile "fetchmail-token" is "user" here nokeep fetchall
> sslmode wrapped sslcertck
>
> Anyone got any ideas/suggestions?

Apologies if this is not new. <feff> is an invisible UTF16 character, 
mostly used to indicate big- or litle-endian data.
I'm not actually sure what an application is supposed to do with it when
coverting from UTF16 to UTF8 (which I *assume* your dovecot is using).

I would start by finding out whether Hotmail is delivering email as UTF16
(whether deliberately or just by not converting what it is given).

Sorry I cannot be more help.

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison                      Kendal, UK
                    [email protected]