[plug] cucipop mail splitting and other oddities

[James Devenish]

In message <1057628886.882.43.camel at vaio>
on Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 09:48:06AM +0800, Ryan wrote:
> Recently on the sendmail servers at work it has been 'splitting'
> emails....The first with complete and correct headers and the first
> few lines of the messages and then another with NO headers (totally
> blank list entry) containing the rest of the message.

1/ Microsoft mail clients (Outlook and Entourage, at least) occasionally
(or, for some people, habitually) produce invalid e-mail (surprise!). I
have had trouble with this in the past (so I changed friends and drove
my old colleagues away -- just kidding).

2/ At the Guild, our staff users' mail is stored in UNIX mbox format so
a visual examination of their spools revealed the sites of problems that
we had (i.e. I could visually see the malformation with my own eyes,
since I am familiar with how an mbox file should look). It could be said
that using a format other than mbox would reduce the opportunities for
mail slicing/splicing problems.

> I removed cucipop and installed qpopper, and both problems were fixed.

3/ ROFL. At the Guild we did the opposite, to solve a problem where
messages were merging together :) I think I determined that the invalid
e-mail was probably interacting with some part of qpopper that simply
assumed correctly-composed mail. (OTOH perhaps I never worked out
exactly what was wrong. There are so many different malformations
produced by M$ mail clients that I find it hard to recall incidents
correctly.)