Subject: Unable to process From lines (envelopes)

From: Jamal Masood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:57:31 +0530

I have a TCP/IP account with my ISP. My ISP uses pine as their e-mail
software which can be accessed through shell account. I use Win 95 and
dial up connection without any proxy server.

I access my mail through Netscape Gold at my office and Netscape 4 at my
home. About ten days back my POP3 account developed problem without any
change of setting by me. I have been using this account for years but
never encountered such problem. Whenever I tried to access my mail I got
following error message;
---------------------------------------
The POP3 server responded:
Unable to process From lines (envelopes),
change recognition modes.
-.
---------------------------------------

This happened irrespective of location from where I tried to access my
mail. I loaded Eudora light in my system but to no avail and I still got
similar error message.

The problem was in retrieving incoming mail. There was no problem in
sending out mail.

If I pressed OK in the error message I got another error message saying
that my password for POP3 account was wrong.

I have checked with other users and none of them has this problem.

My ISP has a new maintenance engineer and he was not able to detect the
problem. He had opened my mail through Shell/Unix/Pine and he found that
there was one mail in my inbox and it was marked as read only. He could
not delete this mail. I also tried to access my mail through
Shell/Unix/Pine and noticed that my In-box was  read only.

I am a novice to Unix/Pine and just did not what to do. While searching
the net for an answer I came across your discussion forum and found that
similar problem has been faced by others. I tried searching for the
solution but failed.

Two days back my ISP engineer was able to set right the problem but he
is not revealing the reason.

Can any one please tell me what could have caused this problem and how
to solve this if a similar error appears in future.

Thanks

(Jamal Masood)

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From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 20:43:26 -0700 (PDT)

Sounds like you need to bug your ISP.  Threaten to move your business if
they don't tell you why your e-mail wouldn't work.  :)  I'm curious to
know the answer, too. 

-- 
Scott Leibrand
[email-masked]
* RCW 19.190 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. *
* Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message.          *

---

From: "Phil D'Amore" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 09:46:47 -0400 (EDT)

The only time I've seen this problem is with qpopper on the mail server.
I used to use that on our mail server, and saw this message every once in
a while.  Basically what it is trying to do is find the first message in
your mail spool file.  Mail messages typically start with a line like:

>From [email-masked] Fri Oct 16 13:00:51 1998

(The '>' you see does not belong there in the mail spool.  Something, pine
or sendmail, puts it there to prevent a false detection of a new message
boundary).

Usually, each message is separated by a single blank line, and one of the
above lines.  When qpopper starts up, it takes what's in your mail spool
and copies it to a temporary location.  It then works with this file for
your session.  Whatever is left gets put back in your mail spool file,
before any new stuff that came in.  Also, if the session dies for some
reason, there is a possibility that that file will be left there.  The
next time you start a session, that stuff gets read first, then any new
stuff in the real mail spool.  There are two cases you will get this
message.  1) The mail spool does not begin with one of those From lines,
and 2) The temp file exists, and it does not end w/ a single blank line.

Even though they are two separate files, qpopper does not reset any
internal flags (including the flag that says if the previous line was a
new line) when it switches files.  It does, however, expect that the start
of the mail spool file will be a new message.  So, at the start of the
file, if the newline flag was not set from the temp file, the logic that
parses the first line in the file (There is a special case for this, at
least as of 2.53) pukes, since newline == 0 and IS_FROMLINE returns 1,
which is not a valid message separator.

The fix is to either fudge the header of the top message in the mail spool
if that was corrupt by putting in a From line, or go to the temp mail file
and add a newline at the end.  In my experience, the latter is the most
common.

Like I said, other programs will probably parse the mail in quite the same
way (It's how I do it when I need to parse mail files).  The error message
you report is what qpopper spits out verbatim, however.  As for the
read-only message, I am at a loss.  Perhaps the same kind of header
corruption causes this behavior in pine?

Sorry for the long explanation.  Hope it helps some.

--
Phil D'Amore
UNIX Admin./E-Mail Postmaster           It's never as bad as
Information Technology                  you think it is...
Embry-Riddle University               
Phone: (904)226-7185                    It's always much worse.