Here is my situation.

I installed qpopper about a month ago when I migrated my userbase to a new
mail server.  

After the transfer I ran through the expected calls when the UIDL changed on
the mail spools and some clients began retrieving old mail again.

During this time things were working fine when I received a complaint.

I have a user with a mailbox being shared among 5 people using 4 different mail
clients.  These clients are setup to leave mail on server with one client set to
delete mail after X many days.

One of the clients "Eudora" was reading the Status header that Qpopper was
inserting header.  This had the effect of the user downloading email that was
shown as already read.

Consequently I recompiled with the disable-status option to keep Qpopper from
updating these headers with the understanding that my CPU load would increase
because UIDL would be recomputed everytime the spool was read.

This solved their problem and they were quite pleased.

Several days later I received another call from the same people.

It seems that several of the messages that one of their users was resending
using eudora showed up in their mail spool with identical X-UIDL headers.  

This had the effect of one of the messages being read by the mail clients but
the rest of the affected messages as unreadable as the client believe it had
already downloaded that email.

My theory so far (theory = wild ass guess) is that the user sending the
messages through Eudora (using the send again option) actually sent a message
with a X-UIDL header already included in it.  Sendmail and procmail left the
header in the message and Qpopper saw it and reported the bogus UIDL header to
the mail client when the uidl command was run.

My questions are:

If qpopper sees a X-UIDL header already in the message spool for a particular
message will it recompute a different UIDL or use the one in the header?  

Does the disable-status option affect the previous question?

How does qpopper compute UIDL?


Thanks for any input you have to my questions.


Ted Hatfield

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