[Alpine-info] Message size warning

[Mark Crispin]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Seth Williamson wrote:

> Again, apologies from a newb if this is a commonly understood phenomenon. But 

> I occasionally get an error warning on some messages, something like "Message 

> size does not match expected size," etc.


This is a known bug in the gmail server which Google knows about, intends 
to fix, but has not fixed yet.

Basically, gmail says that the message is one size, but when Alpine tries 
to fetch it it gets a different amount of data.  If Alpine fetches 
messages in chunks, it will think that it is done with a too-short 
announced size even though there is more message data.  A too-long 
announced size can under certain circumstances be indistinguishable from 
an I/O error.

Normally, Alpine will catch that the server lied, and when it does it 
gives you this warning to let you know that your server lies and that 
there may be the other cases where it doesn't catch the lie and does the 
wrong thing.

As I said, Google knows about this bug, and eventually is going to fix it.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.