[Dovecot] >From escaping

Jethro R Binks jethro.binks at strath.ac.uk
Tue Oct 5 19:18:25 EEST 2004


On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On 5.10.2004, at 16:59, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
> 
> > That's interesting-- I'd guess that email clients are not going to
> > do the ">From" quoting unless they are reading/writing directly to
> > the mbox themselves, and not when accessing IMAP/POP folders.  This
> > would mean that an email client would see a potentially incorrect
> > message, and could corrupt an mbox by sending (for copy/append)
> > a message with missing quoting.  I would think that it would be the
> > responsibility of the IMAP/POP server to maintain the mbox
> > integrity (not to mention the correctness of the message).  But I
> > can see where it would be a pain, for sure.
> 
> Dovecot (and eg. mutt) uses Content-Length header to figure out how large the
> message body is, so clients can't mess anything by sending From-lines. Also
> Dovecot requires that From-line has correct syntax and valid timestamp or it's
> not treated as From-line.

What happens if the message content is altered by some means, outside of 
the mail domain (for example, by manually editing a message [yes, I know 
it shoudln't happen, but sometimes it has been necessary]), changing the 
length?  How does dovecot handle a discrepancy between actual length and 
that in Content-Length:?

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services
University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK



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