Subject: Pine concatenates messages

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 1995 17:07:50 PST

I am using Pine 3.91 on a system with SunOS 4.1.3.  In a seemingly random 
fashion Pine will add a new incoming message to the last message that came in. 
I have found as many as 5 seperate messages (coming from different people) 
all strung together into one message.  It doesn't seem to happen in a 
consistant fashion ie. sometimes all of the messages are separate and 
sometimes some of the messages are combined while others are separate.

Does anyone know what is going on?  This didn't happen until Pine was upgraded 
to 3.91.

Brian
[email-masked]

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From: Chip Old <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 1995 10:46:28 -0500 (EST)

> Does anyone know what is going on?  This didn't happen until Pine was upgraded 
 
I've seen that a few times, too, with Pine 3.91 running on our SunSparc
Server under Solaris 2.3.  It has happened only a couple of times that I'm
aware of (who knows how many users didn't bother to report it), and I
haven't noticed any pattern to it.  The concatenated messages seem to have
nothing in common other than the fact that their received dates are
consecutive.  I don't know enough about how Pine manipulates the mail file
to say for sure, but if this were one of the old PC or Mac based BBSes I
used to run I would suspect a couple of screwed up start-of-message
pointers (or a failure of the software to recognize them).
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Francis E. Old (Chip Old)         Internet: [email-masked]
Internetworking Administrator     Voice:    (410) 887-6180
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From: Barry Cornelius <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 16:15:11 +0000 (GMT)

On Sat, 4 Feb 1995 [email-masked] wrote:
> sometimes some of the messages are combined while others are separate. ...
Chip Old replied:
> consecutive.  ...

This sounds a bit like something we've had about three or four times.  

In the index the size of a message was very high, whereas when it was
viewed it was not as long.  An inspection of the mailbox (using vi) showed
that the message being displayed was followed by a number of messages not
in the mailbox.  

If you use vi to edit the mailbox in some way (e.g., by replacing the
first character by itself), the mailbox shrunk in size typically by 160
characters.  I assume that for some reason null characters are in the
mailbox which got removed by the use of vi (but I haven't found a good way
of displaying nulls so I'm not really that sure).  

If they are nulls, then I don't know who is to blame for the null
characters.  BTW, elm seems to see all of the messages. 

--
Barry Cornelius                      Telephone: (0191 or +44 191) 374 4717
Academic Support Group, IT Service,            IT Service Office: 374 2892   
Science Site, University of Durham,                          Fax: 374 3741
Durham, DH1 3LE, UK                   E-mail: [email-masked]

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 12:25:16 -0800 (PST)

There is a known bug in Pine 3.91 which Pine's "find next message" code is
confused by the presence of NUL characters in the mailbox.  This bug is fixed
in Pine 3.92, which should be released in the not-too-distant future.

If you want to fix the bug in your own copy of Pine 3.91, get the latest IMAP
toolkit (mail/imap.tar.Z from ftp.cac.washington.edu -- yes, you do want the
3.6-BETA version) and substitute it in place of the 3.5 IMAP toolkit that is
bundled with Pine 3.91.

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From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 20 Feb 95 21:11:37 GMT

[email-masked] (Barry Cornelius) writes:
[...]

 >of displaying nulls so I'm not really that sure).  

vi may be truncating messages.  It would be safer to less the mailbox to see
what the end of the message looks like.  If you want to look for nulls, then
od -ac on SunOS will show them, as will emacs I believe.

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst.    /   _____  ______ 
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