Re: mutt freezes when fed high character in header
* Derek Martin on Wednesday, July 04, 2007 at 15:08:47 -0400:
> If you've ever taken a computer science class at a school
Never. I went to school when there weren't any computers around;
thank God those days (I mean school days) are long gone ...
I'm blissfully uneducated re technical stuff (I got into
non-graphical interfaces for *aesthetical* reasons -- a bit like
Bauhaus: form and function: better functionality -> more beauty).
>> I wasn't accusing Mutt.
>
> I know you're not, but you have it stuck in your head
let's hope it is not an axe
> that Mutt can do something about a bug in a library, and that's
> just not possible.
> [Note: I'm relying on the analysis of others being correct that this
> is a bug in iconv, I have not attempted to verify this myself.
> Assuming that's correct, it is not possible in any practical way for
> mutt to work around.]
I was merely (and stubbornly) suggesting to reevaluate this
assumption, because the way it is ...
>>> and the solution is to update your libiconv to one that's not
>>> broken.
>>
>> Unfortunately there's nothing that tells an unexperienced user
>> that it is iconv's fault.
>
> That's why we have mutt-users and mutt-dev. :)
... chances are high that folks who are less stubborn than me --
expierence tells me that this is a very high percentage of the
population ;) -- /would/ accuse my beloved Mutt.
In the case of the OP the charset-hooks I suggested (courtesy of
Alain Bench) actually helped, sometimes a message-hook would. And
of course the best thing is to upgrade iconv.
But imagine yourself in the situation of urgently trying to
access a mailbox with your favorite client and you just can't,
and you are left in the dark about the causes why this happens.
Then, already a certain level of stubbornness is needed, you open
the huge mailbox with your editor, or start grepping a Maildir,
but what are you looking for? How can you isolate the broken
message, while not being sure that it's the fault of a single
message, the OP just was to a certain extent, because amavis gave
him a warning. Then, more stubbornness, you fire up a non-unicode
environment, and lo and behold, you can open the mailbox, and
then by trial and error, check by moving messages out of the
last 100 to a temporary mailbox (you don't want to lose
correspondence) and retrying to open the mailbox in unicode
environment, CTRL-Z ...
That's why still believe that this is worth looking into, because
otherwise an enormous FAQ would be needed, which might be even
harder to do ;)
c
--
Intelligence is like a four-wheel drive vehicle:
It allows you to get stuck in much more remote places.