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Re: [fetchmail] Retrieval Error - incorrect header line

2003-07-06 15:19:51
On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 02:31:13PM -0700, Daniel L. Miller wrote:

The problem is that there are only certain headers defined by RFC822
to 
be legal in the header of an email. After the header appears a single 
blank line as a delimiter between the header and the body. If illegal 
lines are found it the header before the blank line, fetchmail
normally 
will not retrieve the email. According to the programmers, to code 
fetchmail to actually retrieve such mail would be cumbersome and 
error-prone.

So let me get this staight.  Microslow Orifice's Outlook 2000 or XP, or
Outlook Express, or ANY OTHER POP3 CLIENT I'VE USED has no problems
retrieving these badly formatted messages - but
fetchmail/sendmail/postfix has a problem?  I thought I was moving to
Linux to make things EASIER.

You're using Debian Sid, and you think things are supposed to be easier 
than Windows?! (Don't get me wrong. I'm using Debian testing. But it's 
anything but _easier_ than Windows.)

This is a question of standards. Microsoft doesn't follow them and we
do. Microsoft never met a standard it didn't subvert. Yes, fetchmail
could recode to circumvent this non-standards-compliant email, but the
effort isn't necessarily worth it in the eyes of the developers. Since
these guys don't get paid for this (as they do at Microsoft), I can
understand their reluctance. Open Source developers also tend to take a
more inflexible stance when it comes to companies and software which
ignore standards. I supposed if some enterprising programmer wanted to
do the work, maybe a comprehensive patch might be accepted into the CVS
to download munged mail regardless.

You _could_ apply the aforementioned patch, which solved the problem for 
me. All mail that had the characteristics you mentioned was invariably 
spam, and could be deleted without remorse.

Paul