Bug 447342

According to RFC 2047, alpine is doing the right thing by not decoding long
subject lines:
   An 'encoded-word' may not be more than 75 characters long, including
   'charset', 'encoding', 'encoded-text', and delimiters.  If it is
   desirable to encode more text than will fit in an 'encoded-word' of
   75 characters, multiple 'encoded-word's (separated by CRLF SPACE) may
   be used.

   While there is no limit to the length of a multiple-line header
   field, each line of a header field that contains one or more
   'encoded-word's is limited to 76 characters.

However, other popular email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird violate the
standard and decode the long subject lines anyway, so they appear to work to the
end-user while alpine appears broken... :(

So since MRC apparently fixed this in the non-public alpine tree, we just need
to wait. I see you marked it low priority, my policy is normally to update
alpine after a message goes out to

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/alpine-info/alpine-announce.html

Does that sound good to you Jeff?

That sounds good to me.  I just wanted to track this for Fedora with this BZ.

OK, alpine 2.00 is in updates-testing:

su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update alpine' 

You can provide feedback for the update here:
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-7290

Please let me know if this fixes the bug. If you find any
unrelated bug, please file on the alpine 2.00 update bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=460332#c14

No, I'm still seeing a single '=' with alpine-2.00 on certain emails.  The behavior doesn't seem to have changed between alpine-1.10 and alpine-2.00.

What's interesting, though, is that this seems to depend somewhat on the IMAP server software.  I've got folders on both a Zimbra 5 server and a Cyrus 2.2.12 server.  The same email -- copied from one server to the other with alpine -- displays differently on the different IMAP servers.  On the Cyrus server, alpine shows:
  Subject: =
but the same email on the Zimbra server shows:
  Subject: ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ....

I've played with the number of '¡Hola, señor!' copies in the Subject line and found that by shortening it just a bit, it displays correctly on the Cyrus server (with both alpine-1.10 and 2.00), even though it's still much longer than 75 characters.

Strange...

If you want to close this as WONTFIX or CANTFIX, I'm okay with that.  If this ever gets fixed in upstream alpine, it'll make its way to Fedora automatically.

OK, this does seem to be in the IMAP server and not alpine. Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 does not display it correctly in a local store (such as Sent) or dovecot-1.0.7-2.el5 either, but if I copy it to Gmail via IMAP both Thunderbird and alpine (1.10 or 2.00) display all the Holas. 

Jeff, you've found a tricky one, I guess we should report this to Cyrus and dovecot. And GMail doesn't display correctly when sending from the web interface, only via IMAP. :)

I bet MRC actually fixed the UW-IMAP server and not alpine at all. Rex, you might want to check UW-IMAP but I don't think there's been a recent snapshot.

I'm going to close NOTABUG.


And FYI, for future reference the alpine-info mailing list is now on a new server. The new URL for the thread referenced above is:

http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2008-May/thread.html#745