At 7:40 PM -0600 2/15/01, Mike Weller wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One of our users claims to have "lost" email. After doing some
> investigations with a backup of his mailbox, I noticed something
> peculiar.
>
> Pine, Elm, Frm, IMP (our IMAP interface) all showed 10 messages in
> his inbox, but if I went:
>
> telnet localhost 110
> user username
> pass password
> it said there were only 2 messages!
>
>
> I determined that for some reason, there was no LINEFEED between
> the end of message #2 and the header of message #3 (Where
> "From ..." is located), and so forth.
>
> I realize that this is not qpopper's fault, since it's probably not
> a standard format. Is there a way to make it work? Has anyone else
> encountered this problem?
>
> Alternatively, I'd like to treat the source of the problem. Never
> before have I seen e-mails all of a sudden be strung together with no
> linefeeds in between. I'm using exim, not sendmail. The other
> programs that "may" have put the mailbox back together incorrectly
> (from deleting a message) would be qpopper, imapd, or exim itself.
> I'm not sure what the cause was. I can't reproduce the problem. If I
> delete the 10th message with imapd or elm/pine, qpopper all of a
> sudden sees 9 messages instead of 2 (ie, the mailbox was completely
> reconstructed in the correct way).
>
> I was using qpopper v2.53, but I upgraded to v3.12, hoping that would
> solve the problem, but it didn't.
>
> Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!
If it's a Solaris system, the Content-Length may be messed up.
Certainly we've seen cases where the local delivery agent is
/bin/mail and gets confused by some badly-formed MIME messages and
causes problems like this. Usually switching to mail.local helps.
It's very unusual that deleting one message makes Qpopper see 10
instead of 2. I'd expect to see a difference of one message, not 8.
Do you still have the original spool? Could you send a tarball of it
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>?
