Pine has a bug with its handling of IMAP4 mailbox referrals (per RFC2193). This bug manifests when Pine goes to append the Fcc for a sent message, and receives the mailbox referral response. Pine correctly parses the referral, but then tries to append a zero-length message to the referenced location. Here's a protocol log that demonstrates the bug. (I have changed usernames and server names; otherwise, the output is unmodified.) While talking to imap.example.com: >>> 00000016 APPEND INBOX {359} <<< 00000016 NO [REFERRAL imap://;AUTH=*@imap2.example.com/user.smith] Remote mailbox. While talking to imap2.example.com: <<< * OK imap2.example.com Cyrus IMAP4 v2.1.3-048 server ready [authentication details omitted] >>> 00000003 APPEND user.smith {0} <<< 00000003 NO Message has no header/body separator This bug is present in pine-4.44-1.72.0 (the latest 7.2 errata). I have not tested other versions/releases. To reproduce this bug, arrange for an IMAP server to return a mailbox referral when Pine attempts to APPEND the Fcc copy of a sent message.
Please note that unless you specifically *don't* want me to do so, I also plan to take up this issue on the pine-info mailing list.
One of the members of Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Systems Group had this to say about pine's IMAP handling: > Actually, during development of the Aggregator, we've worked with the pine > developers to fix this problem, and the copy of pine on andrew should have > the problem corrected. (There are actually several issues with pine and the > aggregator, this is however perhaps the worst). > > I am fairly certain that if you build pine 4.44 against the development > c-client library, most of the issues go away (including APPEND and > Referrals), though there is a small patch that needs to be applied to pine > itself in order to correct some UI issues and performance issues that still > exist. So, I rebuilt pine-4.44-1.72.0 using the c-client 2002-04-24 development snapshot. Indeed, pine now handles mailbox referrals correctly. I've attached my pine-4.44-c-client.patch file, and my new pine.spec file. Please give them a whirl. (Based on my preliminary testing, they don't seem to break anything.) IMO, pine's IMAP defects are severe enough to warrant releasing an errata to fix them. (They're not going to get fixed in pine until the current c-client development branch is moved to production, and the pine developers can release a new version of pine built against it).
Created attachment 55527 [details] patch to update pine-4.44 to development c-client snapshot
Created attachment 55528 [details] spec file to build pine (now release 1.72.1) using pine-4.44-c-client.patch
The attached patch changes a lot more than just the bug it fixes. There is no way to ensure quality without a full beta release cycle. This is something that will have to wait until the PINE team releases an official PINE update which fixes the problem, or a very small patch which fixes just this one problem can be made. Also, keep in mind that PINE is not true open source, and large modifications of the source code put things on shaky legal ground, while also making the modified PINE behave differently from all other vendors code. Barring blaring security holes, our pine remains as close to upstream as we can keep it, and defer all bug fixes to them to release official updates for. I suspect it wont be long until a new pine release is due.
I'm closing this bug as WONTFIX for now, as theres no way I am shipping pine development code. pine stable releases are bad enough. pine devel code is likely to fix one problem and introduce 50 others. Since it's only reported by one person, and is a rather rare feature, I don't consider it worthy of a special erratum. When an official pine release is out that fixes the problem however, it will appear in rawhide.
pine 4.50 and later (c-client 2002a and later, really) fix this problem. Phoebe (at least the first revision) still contains 4.44, however. Could you please get your personal development RPMs into Rawhide/Phoebe? I'd really like to see 8.1 (or whatever it's called) go out the door with a version of pine that actually does IMAP properly...
The issue of including pine 4.5x in the distribution is covered in bug #78497 If pine 4.5x resolves this issue, then the issue will be resolved in Red Hat Linux when pine 4.5x or later finally gets included in the distribution. This issue is not something that will be backported by Red Hat to pine 4.44 however, so I am reclosing it as WONTFIX.