huge bug

[Ken Murchison]

OK.  After talking with Rob and with Mark Crispin (author of UW IMAP), 
the problem comes down to an unfortunate implementation decision in 
Eudora and a change in the wording of the MIME specification from RFC 
1521 to RFC 2046.

Technically, there is nothing syntactically incorrect with the MIME 
message generated by Eudora.  Unfortunately, Eudora 5.1 and earlier 
generates MIME boundary strings which can contain other boundaries as 
substrings.

There is wording in RFC 2046 (which wasn't present in RFC 1521) which 
states that such boundaries should be treated as the same.  This is what 
Cyrus does.

UW IMAP whose original MIME parsing code predates RFC 2046, still 
follows the RFC 1521 text which mentions nothing about the substring case.

None of us know why the substring text was added in RFC 2046, but both 
Cyrus and UW can claim that they are correct.  The fact that Eudora has 
been changed in v5.2 to match RFC 2046 is a good thing, and all users 
are urged to upgrade.

In lieu of this, I have just added a "eudora_mime_hack" option to Cyrus, 
which will be available in v2.1.14 ("real soon now") to work around the 
MIME boundary issue.


Laurent LAVAUD wrote:
> A 13:30 27/06/2003 -0700, vous avez écrit :
> 
>> Correct, it is a known bug with a lot of Eudora versions. Qualcomm has 
>> it's
>> work cut out for itself to clean up that POS.
> 
> 
> OK, but why does wu imap server works ?  Can we expect cyrus server to 
> correct this client issue ?
> We can't tell all Eudora senders to change their habits and/or migrate 
> to Mulberry, Outlook...
> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ken Murchison" <ken at oceana.com>
>> To: "Laurent LAVAUD" <laurent.lavaud at u-bordeaux2.fr>
>> Cc: <info-cyrus at andrew.cmu.edu>
>> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 1:15 PM
>> Subject: Re: huge bug
>>
>>
>> > If you want to send the message as it sits in the Cyrus and UW
>> > mailstores (gzip it so that the mailer doesn't munge it) and possibly
>> > capture the protocol log of the client trying to fetch the message, we
>> > _might_ be able to figure out what is happening.
>> >
>> > My guess would be that Eudora is not formatting the MIME message
>> > correctly (ill-formed/missing boundary?).
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Laurent LAVAUD wrote:
>> > > huge bug for us...
>> > >
>> > > Here it is: when we compose mails with Eudora 5.02 or Eudora 5.2 with
>> styled
>> > > text and an attachment (an image for example), the same Eudora is 
>> unable
>> to
>> > > read it correctly (the body contains strange code instead of 
>> showing the
>> text
>> > > and the image link).
>> > > This occurs only when we send the mail with the 2 formats proposed by
>> Eudora
>> > > (text only and styled text together).
>> > >
>> > > What make me think it's a cyrus bug is that if we send exactly the 
>> same
>> message
>> > > to the same server that runs wu imap instead of cyrus, everything is
>> fine!
>> > >
>> > > Huge for us because 80% of our clients are Eudora (about 2000 
>> clients)
>> and
>> > > people often compose mails with styled texts and attachments...
>> > >
>> > > Is there an issue to this except telling our users (and our 
>> senders but
>> this
>> > > should be more difficult) not to use Eudora ?
>> > >
>> > > The server is sendmail 8.9.12 + cyrus 2.1.13
>> > >
>> > > Thanks for issues if available...
>> > >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
>> > Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
>> > 716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
>> > --PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
>> >
>> >
>> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp