[Alpine-info] [Append of zero-length message] error in NNTP

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2012, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:


:) I wasn't sure if this was an alpine issue or something about the 

:) newsgroup where I've been encountering this error, So I started there, 

:) for details please see:

:) 

:) http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/14660


I see your problem. A summary of your problems is as follows: you save 
messages using a filter, but when you get to expired messages Alpine fails 
to save messages.

First, when the store is NNTP, a server is allowed to advertise messages 
that have expired. This is normal, however, Alpine does not handle this 
gracefully when it is *saving*.

Unfortunately, Alpine thinks that saving between any two stores is an 
atomic operation (it has to complete successfully or fail completely). 
While this is nice (because you never have to worry if all messages were 
transfered once the command ended successfully), it also has some 
problems, as in "a save 500 messages can fail because message 499 was not 
fetched". There is no "partial save" feature, which would be extremely 
useful in general.

To me, Alpine is good at reading messages, but saving is not the best. 
Considering saving an atomic operation under all circumstances is not 
quite right, there should be middle ground, a process that lets you review 
the current changes to be done and predict what will happen in the event 
you accept those changes, but not unilaterally fail the operation.

This is in my todo list now.

-- 
Eduardo
http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/