Re: email header wrapping and truncation
- From: Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>
- To: balsa-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: email header wrapping and truncation
- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 18:49:23 -0400
Hi Peter,
On 2017.07.21 17:09, Peter Bloomfield wrote:
Hi Jack,
On 07/21/2017 03:18:56 PM Fri, Jack wrote:
Greetings all,
This is a problem that has bitten me in the past, but I finally
tracked it down, with sufficient examples to demonstrate the problem.
In most cases, email headers (in the actual message) are
Header: content
However, for some long values, it appears as
Header:
content
If the content is long enough, you get
Header:
first part of header, but tr
uncated and wrapped.
It seems that in this last case, Balsa only sees the first line as
the value of that header ("first part of header, but tr") which can
cause a problem, if, for example, it is the "Reply-to:" header. I
now have two examples of this actually happening. One is marketing
messages I used to get from consumer cellular. The other is from
the gentoo.org mailing list system. If I send a subscribe reqeust,
it replies with a message I need to reply to to confirm the
request. However, it's Reply-to is of the third form above, and not
noticing the truncation, my first reply just got me an error bounce.
Most interesting however, is that when I went to find the comsumer
cellular example, I found a fourth type:
Header: Initial part o
f header, with more here, and th
e remainder here
In this case, Balsa gets the entire content of the header without
problem.
I suppose the difference between the third and fourth types depends
on one of the mail handlers between the sender and the one I get the
message from by POP3. However, I don't know if consumer cellular
changed their system, or something changed someplace else in
between, or perhaps some change in Balse (or a library) as all
examples I can find of the third type are older than the fourth type.
Sorry for rambling, but hopefully this explains my issue enough for
someone to either confirm it or point out what I'm doing wrong.
Let me know if you need any other info, such as versions of
libraries my Balsa is compiled against.
Thanks for any help.
Jack
Sorry to read about the problems you're seeing!
Those continuation lines (beginning with WSP: space or tab) are all
supposed to be 'unfolded' by concatenating them with the 'Header:'
line. Balsa hands off the whole job of parsing the message to GMime,
which then provides unfolded headers on request. The GMime code that
handles unfolding has been stable for many years.
Perhaps the lines that don't get concatenated have some other
non-printing character before the WSP. Where do you see the folded
headers? In an mbox? Can you check for other spurious characters?
Best,
Peter
My inbox is an mbox, but I generally move almost everything to maildir
folders, so that's where all my recent examples come from. I haven't
noticed any odd characters (just looking with grep or in emacs) so I'll
have to dig back in and try some "od -c". Since the only thing exposed
would be email addresses, I suppose I can extract different examples
into an attachment.
I've had gmime 2.6.23 installed since February, but had this problem
with Consumer Cellular early 2016 and with Gentoo mailing lists just
the past few days. I suppose "Reply-to" is one of the few headers
(other than "From" and "CC" which frequently get used, but only
infrequently gets a really long value. In the case of the mailing
lists, it's not a "real" address, but is parsed by the list software so
all it needs is that address and the subject to know what to do.
Jack
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