dovecot - Apr 2003 - Corrupt mbox handling

I've found that if an mbox file has two consecutive 'From'
delimiters, I
get the error:

pop3(user): Error indexing mbox file /var/spool/mail/user: LF not found
where expected

UofW apparently ignores the second 'From' silently.  I've been
trying to
run dovecot in gdb to get more details on exactly what is happening, but
I haven't quite mastered the art of attaching to the pop3 process between
the login process completing and it exiting.  Is there some trick to doing
that?

If I can't work around it in dovecot, I can just write something in perl
to fix all the duplicate 'From' lines.

Thanks,

Kristian Hoffmann
PC-InTOUCH/FireToWire System Administrator
khoff at pc-intouch.com
---

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 22:18, Kristian Hoffmann wrote:
> I've found that if an mbox file has two consecutive 'From'
delimiters, I
> get the error:
> 
> pop3(user): Error indexing mbox file /var/spool/mail/user: LF not found
> where expected
This is in TODO:

    - two adjacent From-lines breaks us. not too easy to fix though.

Problem is that two From-lines aren't really "possible", because
the
line feed before and after belongs to the same From-line. And since the
newline between the two From-lines is shared between them, it breaks my
parsers. I guess the correct way to fix this would be to completely
ignore the first From-line if second one comes right after it. I'm not
sure how easily that is fixed.

I once tried fixing this but the code got too kludgy back then, but I
think I tried to keep the first one as empty message then. Ignoring it
might be easier.
> UofW apparently ignores the second 'From' silently.  I've been
trying to
> run dovecot in gdb to get more details on exactly what is happening, but
> I haven't quite mastered the art of attaching to the pop3 process
between
> the login process completing and it exiting.  Is there some trick to doing
> that?
Well, you can run the pop3 binary directly and talk to it via stdin.