Re: Problems with IMAP connections to Gmail

--On November 20, 2012 2:01:41 PM -0800 Bill MacAllister 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> It has been years since I have seen this problem.  It when away when I
> stopped trying to connect to Exchange with Mulberry.  As I remember
> what was happening was that Mulberry would issue imap requests and
> then at the bad message Exchange would just hang up the phone.  It was
> not clear what the correct solution was with Exchange and it would not
> surprise me if gmail was doing the same.  Note, I have never seen this
> problem with any version of Cryus, Zimbra, or PMDF imap servers.

This happens because Mulberry is a "real" IMAP client and is more 
sensitive to bugs in the IMAP server software.  Many other IMAP clients 
just download the headers and parse them themselves.  Mulberry asks the 
server to send header information using the IMAP protocol and if the 
stuff sent is invalid it croaks.  I've seen this most often when EMail 
addresses contain funny characters and the server doesn't quote them 
properly.  This often ends up as unbalanced quotes or parens in the 
data returned to Mulberry.  AOL is particularly bad this way.  I wish 
Mulberry would just ignore the bad message with an error report and 
carry on with the rest of them, but this might be tricky to implement.

        Mike