Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox
On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 12:46:36PM -0600 I heard the voice of David DeSimone, and lo! it spake thus: > > Mutt chooses to be picker about the "From " syntax because some mailers > don't properly escape a "From " that is inside the body of the message. Well. Mutt doesn't escape "^From " in the body either when it writes, since it always writes with Content-Length: headers. There's no way to win with mbox. You escape From_'s, you mangle the message, which can do things like screw up crypto signatures, and the various other similar problems. You don't escape them and rely totally on Content-Length:, you get yourself into trouble if the file is edited manually or otherwise changed without updating Content-Length to match. Say I change stuff in the middle of a message, and the last line is "From something ". If I don't adjust the Content-Length:, depending on how smart the parser is, it'll either: - Puke when (end-of-header+content-length) isn't the start of a new message - Search forward from(end-of-header+content-length) to try and figure out where the next message is, in which case it'll either get an extra empty message (my From) if I added stuff, or skip over a whole message and include it in the current, if I deleted stuff. - Search forward AND backward, in which case, who knows? -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) |[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unix Systems Administrator |[EMAIL PROTECTED] Specializing in FreeBSD |http://www.over-yonder.net/ "The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"
Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox
James Greenwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I looked more carefully at the From lines of the messages > it was picking up compared to those it wasn't, and in the > ones mutt can see, the sender is an e-mail address, e.g. : > > From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Oct 16 12:48:57 2001 > > whereas in the messages mutt is ignoring, it is a name, e.g.: > > From Bruce Smith Wed Oct 17 17:08:13 2001 > > and just removing the space like this solves the problem: > > From BruceSmith Wed Oct 17 17:08:13 2001 This is exactly the problem. Mutt uses a more stringent definition for the mailbox separator, namely "From ". Mutt has some heuristics for recognizing date stamps, but if the userid is more than one word, the heuristics fail. Technically it shouldn't be multiple words anyway. > I don't know enough about the mailbox format to know whether > this is a bug in mutt, or a bug in the LibDBX program I used > to translate the Outlook files into mailbox format. It's a bug in the tool that wrote the mailbox, LibDBX, I suppose. But it's hard to fault it, since the mailbox format is so loosely defined. Mutt chooses to be picker about the "From " syntax because some mailers don't properly escape a "From " that is inside the body of the message. -- David DeSimone | "The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | that there is no man really clever who has not Hewlett-Packard | found that he is stupid." -- Gilbert K. Chesterson Richardson IT|PGP: 5B 47 34 9F 3B 9A B0 0D AB A6 15 F1 BB BE 8C 44
Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox
On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 07:29:06AM -0800, David Ellement wrote: > On 020331, at 16:23:09, James Greenwood wrote > > However the problem is still there - on the mailbox I tried, > > pine still sees 102 messages and mutt sees only 3. > > > > Any other ideas? > > Perhaps formail could reformat the mailbox: > > formail -d newmbox > Thanks David - I tried that, it increased the number of visible messages from 3 to 14, but all the extra ones were actually attachments to other messages, not real messages themselves. However I think I've managed to fix the problem !!! I don't know if there's a bug in mutt though. I looked more carefully at the From lines of the messages it was picking up compared to those it wasn't, and in the ones mutt can see, the sender is an e-mail address, e.g. : From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Oct 16 12:48:57 2001 whereas in the messages mutt is ignoring, it is a name, e.g.: From Bruce Smith Wed Oct 17 17:08:13 2001 and just removing the space like this solves the problem: From BruceSmith Wed Oct 17 17:08:13 2001 The names with spaces are obviously related to the fact that the e-mails came from Microsoft Outlook folders originally. I don't know enough about the mailbox format to know whether this is a bug in mutt, or a bug in the LibDBX program I used to translate the Outlook files into mailbox format. If no-one can answer that off the top of their head I'll read some docs/ RFCs I guess, and perhaps make a bug report to the approrpiate person. Anyway my problem should be easy enough to fix now - I can feel a regular expression coming on... Thanks a lot for your help everyone. James -- James Greenwood | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox - Content-Length?
On 020331, at 16:23:09, James Greenwood wrote > However the problem is still there - on the mailbox I tried, > pine still sees 102 messages and mutt sees only 3. > > Any other ideas? Perhaps formail could reformat the mailbox: formail -d newmbox -- David Ellement
Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox - Content-Length?
On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 05:21:36AM +0200, Sven Guckes wrote: > * James Greenwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-03-30 17:05]: > > I have recently switched from Pine to Mutt and I have several mailboxes > > that open fine in Pine but not in Mutt. Mutt seems to concatenate some > > of the messages together so that there are fewer messages in the > > index... > > Are there any Content-Length lines? If so - delete them. > It's easy with vi: > :g/^Content-Length:$/d > ... > Does it work now? Hi Sven! I couldn't get that g command to work, had to change it to :g/^Content-Length:.*/d which seemed to do the trick. There were Content-Length lines in the file, which are now gone. However the problem is still there - on the mailbox I tried, pine still sees 102 messages and mutt sees only 3. Any other ideas? > > .. how can I re-order an existing mailbox file by date so that > > the file itself changes... > > Tag all messages and the save them to a new file (folder)... Thanks for that tip, although obviously I won't be able to try it on my corrupt(?) mailboxes until mutt can read them OK. > have fun! :-) OK cheers :-) James -- James Greenwood | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mutt ignoring 'From ' lines in mailbox - Content-Length?
* James Greenwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-03-30 17:05]:
> I have recently switched from Pine to Mutt and I have several mailboxes
> that open fine in Pine but not in Mutt. Mutt seems to concatenate some
> of the messages together so that there are fewer messages in the
> index...
Are there any Content-Length lines? If so - delete them.
It's easy with vi:
$ vi ~/Mail/folder
:g/^Content-Length:$/d
:x
$ mutt -f ~/Mail/folder
Does it work now?
> .. how can I re-order an existing mailbox file by date so that
> the file itself changes, rather than doing it dynamically (and
> slowly on a large mailbox) every time the mailbox is opened?
Tag all messages and the save them to a new file (folder).
T tag-pattern
. all ("contains at least some character")
; tag-prefix (applies following command to all tagges messages)
C copy-message
+NEW foldername "NEW"
The folder "NEW" (usually ~/Mail/NEW) should now
contain all the messages in the current order.
To change the order use 'o' ("sort-mailbox") -
before copying/saving the messages to a new folder.
have fun! :-)
Sven
--
Sven Guckes http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/mutt/setup.html
Mutt setup from scratch, Sven's sample setup; attribution, "limit", "list"
vs "subscribe", histories, mailcap, POP, hooks, use of external pagers,
troubleshooting, adding header lines, "from Mozilla to Mutt".
