[fetchmail-devel] broken behavior in Exchange Server 2003 IMAP4rev1

[Adam S. <sim...@ci...>]

Hi,

I use fetchmail to grab my mail over IMAP from an Exchange server.
I've noticed that a number of multipart MIME messages become broken
after being downloaded by fetchmail.  The messages look fine when I
point my mail client directly at the IMAP server.  However, once
they've been downloaded by fetchmail, the boundary used in the message
body doesn't match the one in the Content-Type header.

I tracked down the problem, and it occurs because the Exchange server
is rewriting the MIME boundary before sending it to the IMAP client.
It rewrites the boundary differently (using a different randomly
generated string) for each IMAP request.  Because fetchmail downloads
the headers and body separately, this results in a different boundary
in the Content-Type header than in the message body.

This only happens for messages with a Content-Transfer-Encoding of
"binary".  Messages with a transfer encoding of "7bit" and "8bit" seem
to work just fine.


This looks like the same problem described with Lotus Domino 5 servers
in section X6 of the FAQ.  This message seems to indicate that you are
reluctant to modify fetchmail to work around this broken behavior:

  http://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/fetchmail-devel/2006-August/000760.html

I don't suppose I can convince you to reconsider?  (I somehow doubt
I'll have much luck convincing Microsoft to fix exchange.)


In case it helps, my IMAP server reports itself as:
  Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 IMAP4rev1 server version 6.5.7638.1

-- 
Adam Simpkins