[MlMt] Folder with ? or è or à

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 10 Sep 2013, at 20:14, Bill Cole wrote:

> On 10 Sep 2013, at 13:28, Olivier Bedouelle wrote:
>
>> Following the discussion this morning, I tested AltaMail.app on my 
>> ipad. software created folder with names containing accents or ?
>
> That may be a violation of RFC3501 Sec. 5.1, which strictly defines 
> mailbox names as 7-bit. There is a defined mechanism for representing 
> non-ASCII characters in mailbox names using a modified UTF-7 encoding, 
> but it has historically had flawed support in both clients and 
> servers. There is also an extension defined for general UTF-8 support 
> including mailbox names, but servers that support it must be 
> explicitly told to enable UTF-8 by an IMAP client before they send 
> that client UTF-8 strings. As a practical matter, it is very risky to 
> use non-ASCII characters in mailbox names in an account that is used 
> with diverse clients because there is a diversity of incorrect 
> implementations of both of those mechanisms across clients and 
> servers.

For the record, MailMate supports the UTF-7 encoding. (So far it seems 
to have worked relatively well.) MailMate has no support for the UTF8 
extension. Not even sure I have access to a server that supports it.

MailMate always tries to decode a mailbox name and immediately after 
that MailMate encodes the mailbox name to verify that it matches the 
original mailbox name. If not then the name is not decoded and will 
appear encoded in the GUI. (This is not where MailMate crashes.)

>> MailMate does not accept this type of folder and crashed miserably.
>
> Which is clearly a worse flaw than AltaMail asking the server to use 
> non-ASCII characters in a mailbox name or the server doing so. There 
> is a recommended handling of 8-bit names which does not include any 
> words like "crash" or "miserably." :)

Ouch :-)

Olivier: If you can create a test IMAP account with a mailbox which 
crashes MailMate then it would be very helpful.

-- 
Benny