[Imap-uw] mailutil complains about NUL

[Mark Crispin]

On Sat, 9 Sep 2006, Ross Boylan wrote:
>> What was the *exact* text of the error message?
> Message contains NUL characters

That message came from the Cyrus server.

The latest imap-2006 development snapshot now transforms all NULs in 
message text being uploaded to an IMAP server into 0x80 characters.  This 
will eliminate this issue in mailutil.

> According to the documentation you pointed me to, I can use
> {machine/user=joe}
> to eliminate one of the prompts.

Correct.  I thought that you already know that.  Sorry.

> A small oddity is that I get (identifying info obscured)
> The authenticity of host 'foo.server.com (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
> RSA key fingerprint is [xxx]
> Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
> {foo.server.com/imap} username: joe

Aha.  Mailutil is trying to do an rsh-IMAP session, it's going through ssh 
(probably because someone lunk ssh to the name rsh thinking that would be 
a good thing), and it isn't succeeding.  That must be a big factor in the 
delays.

Try adding /norsh as well, e.g., {machine/user=joe/rsh}

Let me know if that cures the problem.

> Also, I'm trying to figure out if there is a pre-processing phase
> (first pass through the mailbox) followed by a delivery phase.  This
> would make identifying where the time is going easier.  I infer from
> what you say that reading/scanning the input and writing to the IMAP
> server are interleaved, so the long time before I got the error was
> not necessarily spent just in mailutil.

No, not quite.  Mailutil has to locate all messages in the mailbox before 
it can do anything else.  With a 64MB traditional UNIX mailbox this will 
take some time (the time you notice before you see the prompt for the 
userid and password) but not 7 minutes.

>> I don't understand what you mean by "the UW IMAP site."
> http://www.washington.edu/imap/

There is (or should be) a link there to all the documentation files.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
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