Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 447342
long MIME encoded-word subject lines appear as a single =
Last modified: 2008-09-11 16:56:09 EDT
Description of problem: alpine-1.10 displays the subject line as a single '=' character if the subject line is long and in MIME encoded-word (RFC 2047) base64 syntax. I haven't yet determined how long is "long", but here are some examples to demonstrate. This Subject: =?UTF-8?B?wqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3Ih?= correctly appears as Subject: ¡Hola, señor! However, this very long subject line Subject: =?UTF-8?B?wqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3IhIMKhSG9sYSwgc2XDsW9yISDCoUhvbGEsIHNlw7FvciEgwqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3IhIMKhSG9sYSwgc2XDsW9yISDCoUhvbGEsIHNlw7FvciEgwqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3IhIMKhSG9sYSwgc2XDsW9yISDCoUhvbGEsIHNlw7FvciEgwqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3IhIMKhSG9sYSwgc2XDsW9yISDCoUhvbGEsIHNlw7FvciEgwqFIb2xhLCBzZcOxb3IhIA==?= is displayed in alpine-1.10 as just Subject: = Other email clients correctly show Subject: ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! ¡Hola, señor! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): alpine-1.10-4.fc8.i386 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. send yourself an email with a long MIME/Base64 encoded subject line as shown above 2. look at the email when it's received Actual results: Subject line appears as a single '=' character Expected results: Subject line should be decoded and shown Additional info: Also reported to alpine-info list at http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2008-May/000745.html
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