Subject: Invalid mail folder

From: [email-masked] (Kneppers Marc)
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 1995 21:26:11 GMT

Hi,

I have Pine 3.89 running on a SVR4 UNix Box (MIPS). It's been running 
great for a few months now but suddenly on the weekend we've run into a snag.

WHen opening the INBOX I get the error message "[INBOX] is not a folder".

The format has not changed from last week to this week so I don't see 
what has gone wrong.

If I change the date in the very first line of the INBOX to be March  instead
of April -- all of a sudden Pine works again (reads the INBOX).

Another weird thing is that if I send mail to someone, the mail gets 
appended to the first mail message (that has a non-april date). So, I get
1 mail file that contains more than 1 mail message.

ANy thoughts?
(I am a little worried as this is occuring suprisingly close to April Fool's
day).

Thanks,
Marc Kneppers
[email-masked]
(or [email-masked])

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Apr 1995 01:13:17 GMT

In <message-id-edited-for-brevity> Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> writes:

>In 
>the "From " header line, the date is a fixed format ctime() format 
>string, and thus the day field is fixed-width (hence requiring a leading 
>space for single-digit days)....
>This is usually caused by a non-standard mail delivery program at the 
>local site, and generally when this gets called to their attention the 
>sysadmins at the site fix it pronto.

The situation is a little unfortunate here.  Although the date in the
From_ line is indeed supposed to be a fixed-format ctime() string,
almost all mail agents -- including SunOS /usr/ucb/mail, elm, and MH's
inc program -- will accept slight variations, and will tolerate the
missing leading blank in a single-digit day-of-month field.  Thus, if a
slightly 'nonstandard' local mail delivery program is operating, pine
may end up being the only user agent on the system that cannot parse
the mailbox.

So, it now becomes a matter of debate as to which was really broken:
pine or the delivery agent.  From a strict interpretation of de facto
standards, it was the delivery agent that was broken.  But this may not
be a good argument to use when talking to the person who asks, "how come
everything else works but pine doesn't?"
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 16:16:16 -0700

Hello.  By any chance, is the date that works something like "Mar 31" and 
the date that loses something like "Apr 3" (as opposed to "Apr  3")?  In 
the "From " header line, the date is a fixed format ctime() format 
string, and thus the day field is fixed-width (hence requiring a leading 
space for single-digit days).

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot
FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39" (est.)