[1930] in testers
Re: VAX 7.4: emacs movemail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark W. Eichin)
Tue May 26 06:43:46 1992
Date: Tue, 26 May 92 06:43:06 -0400
From: "Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@Athena.MIT.EDU>
To: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
Cc: postmaster@MIT.EDU, testers@MIT.EDU, mar@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [1928]
"Mark A. Rosenstein" <mar> writes:
> For some reason when I attempt to read my mail, movemail prints out an
> error message containing the recieved line from a mail message:
> movemail: Received: ...
> It also fails to delete any of my mail on the mailhub.
This is most likely a side effect of a long-standing movemail
bug -- movemail breaks lines at 128 characters. If you've got a line
with a "." in the 129th place (plus or minus fencepost errors) it will
get interpreted as a message terminator. The "movemail: Received:.."
message occurs because movemail has been reading multi-line responses
(ie. messages) fine, and then goes to DELE them, and for the first
response instead of an OK it gets the text of the last message
(assuming you've only got one of those lines... it gets further out of
phase with each line that breaks as described above.)
It should be easy to verify given the above description (I've
had it happen to me once at another site.) I've got perl code that
will read the messages from the POP server but it doesn't delete them;
using inc to read them and packf to squash them back into a unix-mail
file is another workaround.
I think Calvin Clark <ckclark> was looking into the problem;
the POP code in movemail is really gross, and is difficult to fix (it
would be better to replace it whole; I may yet do that...)
_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
MIT Student Information Processing Board
Cygnus Support <eichin@cygnus.com>
