Re: Alpine and Save

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Riku Virtanen wrote:
> How can I see what IMAP implementation is?

What is the host name of your IMAP server?  I may be able to find out from 
the startup banner.

> Other programs, for example Mozilla, transfer attachments properly.
> This bug has been a big problem some years. My friends in Finland were not
> able to solve it.

There are two possibilities:

(1) The message is corrupt.

The most common problem is BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE content that is sent 
without a MULTIPART wrapping it.  The problem is that many mail gateways 
(such as Yahoo) add little advertising messages at the bottom of the 
message, and there is nothing to prevent those messages from being misread 
as part of the BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE encoded content.

Mozilla does not care if there are data errors or not.  It just ignores 
them, and hopes that something useful results.

(2) The IMAP server does not do partial fetching properly.

Pine and Alpine use IMAP commands to retrieve part of a message.  This 
depends upon correct implementation of that facility by the IMAP server. 
Some poorly-written IMAP servers do not implement it correct.  Of course, 
there is no problem with good-quality IMAP servers, such as UW, Cyrus, and 
Dovecot.

Mozilla does not do partial fetching.  It just downloads the entire 
message, unconditionally, and then works on the local disk copy.  So if 
someone sends you a 100MB spam, you have to wait while it s-l-o-w-l-y 
downloads it to your hard drive.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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