Subject: re: POP3 (update)

From: J T Breitner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 22:13:13 EDT

On Fri, 14 Apr 2000 10:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Mark Crispin [email-masked]
wrote:

> This is a violation of the POP3 specification, which explictly refers to a
> lock being applied when a session is active.

After some sniffing, I figured out what's going on with Symantec's
Virus Scan 2000.

It is, as you eluded to, poor programming.  

Norton modifies the mail settings in "known" clients (Netscape, Outlook, Eudora
and possibly a few others) to retrieve mail through their popproxy.exe.  I suspect
that the proxy calls their filtering upon receipt of the message before passing it
to the user's client software.

In any respect, the popproxy isn't all that robust.  Given the right conditions
within a particular message, the popproxy simply quits doing its job without
disconnecting from ipopd.  It'll stay that way until ipopd times-out.  Of course,
popproxy isn't smart enough to know that other instances of itself are running, so when
Outlook (similarily not too smart) decides the specified time has elapsed and it's
time to check mail again, creates another instance of popproxy and it too
connects to ipopd.  ipopd, tiring of the nonsense of the Windows world, responds with the
mailbox locked message.

It is beyond ironic that the contents of the message that caused popproxy to barf
was one of those "Virus Warning" messages.  I certainly appreciated the humor in
that.

I should bill Symantec for this.

Have a wonderful weekend...