Subject: nul characters

From: "Michael J. Pape" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:59:40 -0400

For some yet undetermined reason, our mail system (Compaq Tru64 v5.1) is
randomly placing line(s) of nul characters (displayed as ^@^@^@ in emacs and
Pico) at mail message boundaries in some of our users' spool files. This is
of course a matter for the Compaq Engineers to solve, and to date they have
been little help.

While most mail readers don't have a problem with the nul characters
(including imap clients using UW-imap daemon), Pine (v4.33) does. At first
reading, Pine will correctly read the messages in the spool file. However,
after reading, deleting, moving... messages and exiting Pine, the spool file
is rewritten, and the nul characters cause Pine to rewrite the file
incorrectly. The From line of the message following the message with
trailing nul characters is rewritten with a double "F", i.e., "FFrom...".
This of course effectively causes the two messages to be concatenated.
Below is an example of two messages before and after reading in Pine...

Has anyone experienced this? Is there a way to make pine interpret the
trailing nul characters a blank lines?

Thanks,
Michael J. Pape
Union College Academic Systems Administrator
Schenectady, NY 12308
518-388-6665
[email-masked]

BEFORE READING WITH PINE (two separate messages):

>From root Wed Apr 11 15:42:59 2001
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:42:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Michael J. Pape" <[email-masked]>
Status: RO

test
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
>From root Wed Apr 11 15:43:03 2001
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:43:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Michael J. Pape" <[email-masked]>
Status: RO

test

AFTER READING WITH PINE (effectively one message):

>From root Wed Apr 11 15:42:59 2001
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:42:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Michael J. Pape" <[email-masked]>
Status: RO

test
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
FFrom root Wed Apr 11 15:43:03 2001
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:43:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Michael J. Pape" <[email-masked]>
Status: RO

test

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