Re: inc and non-compliant long lines redux

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Ralph Corderoy on Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:27:47 +0000:

> It's one peer of one user.  No one else suffers.  (Sorry, Andy.)
> Seems a shame to complicate the code.

Well, actually, it's a system that is  used to notify more than just me,
and I  cannot say that  I'm the only  one impacted, however,  I'm pretty
sure I'm the only one who knows there is a problem at this point.

I agree,  however, that  modifying nmh code,  and more  specifically the
changes that I  made in netsec_readline() are a shame.  I'm not proud of
the changes by any measure.

> Andy, if it were the last, what kind of size would be needed, i.e. how
> long is  the longest line  from this brain-damaged peer,  including CR
> LF?

The longest line that I have  observed was 11,370,773 bytes, however, it
could be any variable length based upon the size of the attachment being
included in the email.

> - Upping the truncation limit to avoid truncating Andy's case. 

What specifically  is meant by this?  Do you mean allocate  more memory?
There currently  isn't really  a "truncation limit"  except for  the bug
that I identified where lines longer than 1024 characters get truncated.
The real problem  is with messages that have huge  lines, inc fails with
an error:

inc: Unable to find a line terminator after 32768 bytes

When this  happens, it leaves  all the  emails previously POP'ed  in the
session on the server, so the next time I run inc, I get duplicates.


Personally, I  would be  fine if  inc decided to  simply insert  a CR/LF
every 998 bytes when it encounters long lines, and in fact, this is what
I originally  accomplished, but then decided  it was only a  little more
effort to  make inc simply continue  reading more data until  it finally
got the CR/LF.

I'm still trying to contact the organization responsible for sending the
messages,  but  so far  haven't  reached  anyone with  enough  technical
knowledge to understand the problem. Maybe  I'll get lucky and find that
one shining  star programmer  that can  fix their  broken form  to email
notification tool.

Andy