Re: [Evolution] Importing from KMail -- Lost Messages

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

Still, having said all that, a good IMPORTER - and not just a native storage format - should be able to deal with this sort of nonsense.

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 18:37 +0200, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> please see http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html
>
> "Stricter parsing of the ``From '' separator line doesn't help either,
> because there are many, many variations on what goes in that line (since
> it was never standardized either); and also, some mail readers include
> that line verbatim when forwarding messages (Sun's MailTool, for
> example) so a stricter parser wouldn't help that case at all, because
> message bodies tend to contain valid matches."
>
> later on the page describes why you can't unmunge ">From" lines as well.
>
> Jeff
>
> On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 00:28 -0500, Garry Williams wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 11:44 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 21:10 -0500, Garry Williams wrote: 
> > > > On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:10 -0500, Rob Matlack wrote:
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > > > but the same symptoms were produced
> > > > in my case because some of my messages had lines in them that matched
> > > > this regular _expression_:
> > > > 
> > > >     ^[Ff]rom[[:space:]]
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > > Hmm, no, it definitely must be capitalised.  I can't see how you could
> > > see it matching against non capitalised words.  It uses a memcmp to
> > > look for the "From " line.
> > 
> > I just did a test and you are right.  My memory is faulty.  It takes a
> > capitalized ^From to trigger the break.
> > 
> > (By the way, I forgot to mention that the experience I described is with
> > Evolution 2.0.1 on Mandrake 10.1.)
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > > Ahh well, that isn't berkeley mailbox format then.  That's something
> > > similar but different.  Rather like sunos' mailbox format which also
> > > uses/honours the content-length header.
> > > 
> > > I had no idea mutt did such a thing, it is a pity, since it is a poor
> > > convention to use.
> > 
> > I also notice a Lines: header in mutt's messages.  I guess it uses both
> > a belt and suspenders.  :-)
> > 
> > Anyway, it might help to change the import test to also check for a mail
> > address after the ^From and some number of white spaces.  Of course,
> > that opens a whole new can of worms because recognizing a syntactically
> > valid E-mail address is non-trivial -- even if it omits comments.  
> > 
> > The third "field" in a ^From separator is a time stamp.  I've seen a few
> > different variations of their formats, depending on the client that
> > created it.  Still, recognizing a time stamp should be easier than an
> > E-mail address.
> > 
> > Maybe a different change would be to, in the presence of Content-Length:
> > or Lines:, ignore ^From when it occurs too soon.
> > 
>
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