Re: [nmh-workers] inc: Unable to find a line terminator after 32768 bytes

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Ken Hornstein on Mon, 09 Sep 2019 17:04:05 -0400:

> In a perfect world  I think we SHOULD parse those  messages (up to the
> limits of virtual memory), but right now we don't.

That's actually  how I figured  this problem out.  I found that  my POP3
daemon kept  crashing and when  I investigated it,  I found that  it was
because  it didn't  have  sufficient  memory to  respond  to inc's  RETR
command. After I increased the amount of memory that the POP3 daemon was
allowed to  allocate, the RETR  command succeeded,  but then I  ended up
with an inc that refused to incorporate emails.

Whether or not  we think making inc handle nonconforming  lines is worth
tackling, it  might be  a good  idea to  make inc  handle the  failure a
little better.  What happened instead  was that inc exited  after having
partially RETR'ieved the message, without having told the POP3 server to
DELE the  ones it had already  successfully pulled down. So  each time I
ran inc, it would pull down the messages, die on the same bogus message,
and repeat; so that I ended up with a few duplicates.

I think issuing a warning and leaving  a bad message on the server would
be better than aborting the entire POP3 session and causing a repeat.

> Based on my personal experience ... you may not be able to find anyone
> who really  cares about fixing that  (I have run into  some people who
> care about  fixing broken  email, most  of the time  I get  ignored or
> blown off). Just to warn you.

Yeah, I just wanted to double-check my  facts before I sent off an email
asking them if they are aware of their misbehaving mail system. I'll see
how they  react (if they even  get the message---it's difficult  to find
functioning postmaster@ addresses these days).

Thanks,

Andy
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