message line endings on MacOSX -- UNIX vs DOS? referred frompostfix list ...

[John Wade]

As one who has been dealing with the CR/LF issue in relation to qmail, I will say
that as long as you are using standards based protocols to access and inject mail
into the mail store, the internal format is irrelevant.    It is best to view cyrus
as a black box, any custom code you write to access cyrus internals could easily be
broken in the next release.    Thus it is neither a cyrus, postfix or IMAP client
problem, it is just the way cyrus is designed to work

The only problem I have had with this is that sieve re-injects mail into the queue
via sendmail and the sendmail interface is not defined by a standard.  (but instead
by the default current behavior of sendmail.)    Since cyrus stores in CR/LF it
injects into sendmail with CR/LF and qmail's sendmail replacement expects LF
only.   I suspect that qmail is the only MTA that has this problem since no one
else has reported it.   (BTW, if anyone is using qmail, I have a fix in place now
that resolve this by patching qmail's sendmail replacement.)

The only time you would want to mess with the internal format is when you are doing
something like a mailstore conversion (I know we converted from UW's IMAP server a
while back using this technique), but even then you may be better of using protocol
based tools to copy.

Enjoy,
John Wade

OpenMacNews wrote:

> hi ken,
>
> thx for the reply =)
>
> >> anyway, can/does cyrus-imap store/process msgs w/ UNIX line endings?
> >> where/how do i specify such?
>
> > Cyrus doesn't mangle line endings of messages in any way.  It expects them to
> > be in RFC 2822 format (CRLF) and stores them that way on disk.
>
> ok. <reading ... http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html>. thx.
>
> i guess some of my (current) confusion stems from the fact that the same
> message sent from my client (Mulberry) to a cyrus imap store, and to a
> 'different' server (CGPro, in this case), both of which are _supposed_ to be
> 'standards compliant' (which i assume means/includes RFC 2822), ends up stored
> on disk with different line-ending formats.  specifically, cyrus-imap has
> DOS-style, and CGPro has UNIX-style.
>
> > How they are stored on disk, shouldn't really matter, because *all* access to
> > the messages should be via one of the Cyrus supported protocols (POP3, IMAP,
> > NNTP) or tools, not by direct access to the mail store.
>
> fair enuf. prob'ly good advice =)
>
> fwiw, the primary reason i'm looking at the line endings is that i'll
> eventually be writing a migration script from other message stores to cyrus ...
> although your comments lead me to think that i should NOT do such a task via
> direct file-level access/manipulation, but rather via a protocol tool, like
> openeing/using an imap session itself ...
>
> another reason i'm 'looking inside' is that i'm (perhaps unwisely and if/until
> i learn more abt cyrus's indexing capabilities ...) considering the use of a
> search engine (mnogosearch, in my case) on my message store, and hence, am
> interested in msgs' text formats ...
>
> so, all that said, and recognizing that it 'shouldn't matter', and that *cyrus*
> 'isn't' mangling' the line endings, am i correct in understanding, then, that
> it's NEITHER a postfix or cyrus issue?  should i be looking to my client
> (Mulberry) for a solution?  it just seems odd to be ending up with DOS line
> endings on a Mac/UNIX platform ... and that something _must_ be 'wrong'.
>
> thx again & cheers,
>
> richard
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