Re: [Evolution] Got one account sort-of working

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2020-05-26 at 17:46 -0700, Van Snyder wrote:
> On Tue, 26 May 2020 23:46:09 +0100 Pete Biggs wrote:
>
> > It told you what the issue is - i.e. that it's a bug in the GnuTLS
> > library.
>
>
> (This is about imap with TLS on 993 not working with sbcglobal.net, 
> which is provided by yahoo.com. The error message is “Error performing 
> TLS handshake: Internal error in memory allocation.”.).
>
> I have a non-yahoo account that receives using TLS on 993 and sends 
> using STARTTLS on 587, and it works. Do different accounts use different 
> versions of gnutls?

No. The problem were zero-length TLS tickets. It didn't affect
connections not using those. It was a server-side change what triggered
it. That's why only yahoo accounts were failing.



> I did "ldd /bin/evolution | grep tls" and there was no output.
>
> BTW, I did "ldd /usr/bin/thunderbird" and it said "not a dynamic 
> executable".

That's because that will be a shell script calling the real
executable. :-)


> It's too bad evolution can't be statically linked. I really prefer 
> evolution to thunderbird.

It wouldn't have helped too much. The bug has been there for years
(since version 3.0.0, probably). So unless you were linked to a really
old GnuTLS version, a statically linked evolution wouldn't have been
free of this bug. Even worse, it would have required to recompile the
whole evolution, rather than just updating the GnuTLS library and have
that fix all the programs in your computer [that use GnuTLS].


On that first link "with people complaining" that André shared, you
could see how it is near resolution by now
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/1876286
( pending that Ubuntu updates their packages, with the update from 
https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/-/issues/997 )

For Scientific Linux, they will need to update GnuTLS or backport the
same patch. You should approach your distribution for that.
The investigation and work already done on those links should make it quite straightforward for them to fix 
it, though, as opposed to having to track it down.


Regards