Re: Lost new mail

Yngvar Folling (yngvar.folling@login.eunet.no)
Tue, 4 Jun 1996 09:29:30 +0200 (MET DST)

In article <WSpsxY9ICZZO089yn@ritz.mordor.com>,
w2jc@ritz.mordor.com (-) wrote:

> } Um, I'm afraid that I do see his point here. I have used uqwk for about
> } two years now, and have never experienced this problem. Granted, lines
> } beginning with From get a > in front, but that is a minor problem.

> If there is a > in front of the From, then you will NOT have the problem.
> The problem occurs when a sender does not put > in front of From when
> there is a blank line just before the From.

But that's precisely it. The sender did *not* put it there. I've sent
mail to myself and seen that the returned message gets it even if I did
not type it in.

> What happens when the messages gets split is that the second part does
> not have a valid set of header lines, and so the pointer which would
> tell Yarn (or other decoder of uqwk/soup packages) how big the next
> message is can be some random pointer size, being whatever the first two
> bytes of the ascii text of the first line of the broken section contains.
> This can, apparently, appear to be very very large. And Yarn 'import'
> will read that 'size pointer' and put that many bytes into the message.

But there is no indication of the message size in the header. The
four-byte integer in front in the SOUP packet is added by uqwk, and the
only way it *can* calculate the size is by counting the bytes from one
>From line to the next -- or until the end of the file if it is the last
message. I don't doubt you. I just wonder where that erroneous message
size comes from.

> Are you SURE that you have not received any mail with a blank line
> followed by a From at the start of the next line? Perhaps he HAS
> changed uqwk and your system has the new version? :)

I'm sure. It was like that when I saw your message. Any instance of
>From at the beginning of a line got > in front, and I'm sure that not
all posters are thoughtful enough to add that.

Yngvar