dovecot - Jun 2003 - Message display corrupted or missing in Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.3

Hi,

a few days ago, we switched our site from pop3 to imap. We are running 
about 20 users with Netscape 7.0 on a FreeBSD-4.8 Server . I installed 
dovecot 0.9.99.1 via the freebsd-ports collection, which was as easy as 
make install and start dovecot. Our users mailboxes are still standart 
mbox format in /var/mail/(user), as it is default in Freebsd.

Now we suffer from a realy ugly problem, which was arising after the 
switch from pop3. When Netscape is newly started, it works fine as 
expected until Netscape displays messages corrupted or stops displaying 
them completly. I also cannot forward them in that state or open or 
delete them in any other way. The only way to get it working again is to 
quit Netscape, exit quickstart and restart Netscape again.

It just hangs on a bunch of messages or all of them.

The user notices it like this: There are three windows displayed in 
netscape mail:

1. imap folder view
2. message list of the current folder and
3. the currently displayed message.

The Folder view and Message List in Netscape is always fine, so the 
Subject and sender, time, etc is always displayed in the List. The 
problem occurs then on some messages when i select them for reading. The 
Message Display below the message list just stays empty (also opening 
the message in a new window doesn't help) or the "title bar in the 
Message Display" stays empty (no subject, sender, time etc) and the raw 
email starting with header, raw html email and encoded attachment is 
shown below, each line followed by another blank line, like this:

== start corrupted email
X-UIDL: 8793f170f0430909

Return-Path: <frank.xx at xx.de>

Delivered-To: xx at mdn.de

Received: from mailrelay1.xx.de (mailrelay.xx.de [212.114.153.xx])

	by xx.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id D31B7A88F

	for <xx at mdn.de>; Wed, 18 Jun 2003 08:55:07 +0200 (CEST)

Received: from ntmail1.xx.de (ntmail1.xx.de [212.114.155.xx])

html and stuff following...

== end   corrupted email

One could read it, but its realy ugly.

It seems, that if i delete a lot of messages in sequence (the morning 
spam), i can force to happen that problem earlier. It always hangs while 
deleting my spam.

I like dovecot a lot, it was easy to install etc and works pretty fine 
except that it still seems to be in beta-stage. Now i would switch to 
courier/uw-imap until dovecot is ready, but the mbox format dovecot is 
using seems to be pretty uniq? I think, the users could keep their 
/var/mail/Username-INBOX, but wouldn't they loose their email folders? 
Is there any way to switch the software in a easy way? Or will there be 
a near future release which will fix that? What about the cvs version?

Thanks for you help!

Best regards

Steven
-- 
--------------------------------------------------
----- Steven Enderle ----- m d n Huebner GmbH ----
----- enderle at mdn.de ----- + 49 911 93 90 90 -----
-----  Digital Imaging & Documentmanagment   -----
--------------------------------------------------

Hi Steven,

It is Netscape problem. Sad, but it is.

Looks like rendering process hangs while it tries to show SPAM.
I have similar problem. Subject line with 8-bit characters is the worst 
i think. Sometimes rules aren't working at all, if message filter tries 
to process SPAM message.

Gasha

Steven Enderle wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Now we suffer from a realy ugly problem, which was arising after the 
> switch from pop3. When Netscape is newly started, it works fine as 
> expected until Netscape displays messages corrupted or stops displaying 
> them completly. I also cannot forward them in that state or open or 
> delete them in any other way. The only way to get it working again is to 
> quit Netscape, exit quickstart and restart Netscape again.

On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 11:54, Steven Enderle wrote:
> a few days ago, we switched our site from pop3 to imap. We are running 
> about 20 users with Netscape 7.0 on a FreeBSD-4.8 Server .
Isn't Netscape 7's mail pretty much the same as Mozilla's mail?
> Now we suffer from a realy ugly problem, which was arising after the 
> switch from pop3. When Netscape is newly started, it works fine as 
> expected until Netscape displays messages corrupted or stops displaying 
> them completly. I also cannot forward them in that state or open or 
> delete them in any other way. The only way to get it working again is to 
> quit Netscape, exit quickstart and restart Netscape again.
Hmm. It might help if you showed what exactly Dovecot was sending to
Netscape. See http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/bugreport.html#sniffing

If it's Dovecot's fault, I can think of only two reasons:

a) Dovecot doesn't detect that mbox was changed and doesn't synchronize
it, and it starts reading messages from wrong location. I haven't
noticed problems with this myself and I've been using Dovecot with mbox
for almost a year now. Maybe some other program touches the mbox in a
way Dovecot doesn't understand.

b) mbox support still doesn't behave fully as IMAP RFC requires. Message
headers may change (not permitted) and so message size may not be
exactly correct (not permitted either). I doubt Netscape really cares
about these though.

Or maybe it's something completely different. I can't say really.
> email starting with header, raw html email and encoded attachment is 
> shown below, each line followed by another blank line, like this:
> 
> == start corrupted email
> X-UIDL: 8793f170f0430909
> 
> Return-Path: <frank.xx at xx.de>
Was there any other corruption than extra empty lines? Is there ever any
other corruption?
> I like dovecot a lot, it was easy to install etc and works pretty fine 
> except that it still seems to be in beta-stage. Now i would switch to 
> courier/uw-imap until dovecot is ready, but the mbox format dovecot is 
> using seems to be pretty uniq? I think, the users could keep their 
> /var/mail/Username-INBOX, but wouldn't they loose their email folders? 
> Is there any way to switch the software in a easy way? Or will there be 
> a near future release which will fix that? What about the cvs version?
You should be able to switch between UW-IMAP and Dovecot easily. Only
difference is that Dovecot saves mailbox subscriptions to
~/mail/.subscriptions and UW-IMAP to ~/.mailboxlist. And also that
Dovecot shows only mailboxes under ~/mail by default, UW-IMAP shows
everything under ~/. The ".imap" directories that Dovecot creates can
be
deleted without any data loss.