#17 Queries with special characters cause mail sending to fail?

[Bill Thies]

This bug might have been associated with MAPI, and
should be re-tested to make sure it still exists. But here
is the old bug report:

Opened by thies@mit.edu on 2002-03-08

There's a problem with the representation of string
queries on the client side, in the event that the user
enters weird characters. I tried a bunch of weird
searches at once, so I'm not sure exactly what broke it.
Everything looked fine 'til I got to sending mail, at which
point it said that it was "trying to send mail" (from the
command line prompt) but it wasn't having any effect on
Outlook Express, even though it was open and running in
the background.

So I realized that we're storing queries as filenames in
directories. My first query ends with a ".", and then the
client appends a ".tek", so I thought the double-dot
might have been causing problems. So I moved the
whole directory containing this query out of the way,
restarted the client & proxy, and tried to send mail
again. This time, exactly one query was sent, and it
looked to be the directory that I moved!-- so maybe
there was a hang-up or delay in talking to Outlook
Express the last time.

But then I systematically removed other directories and
despite my experimenting, I can't get any more mail to
send. I'm not sure where the problem is.

--------

P4: client crashes if install uses pre-existing jdk pre-1.3.
installer/client fails to configure web
Fuji%20Finepix%202800
Mason MI Mushrooms
"fujitsu siemens forum
whistleblowers and nurses australia

' ' ' s ' `/% @# 23/ casjkld 23923-
\n\n\n\n\n \rrrr

--------

That one query above is indeed just a lot of spaces, no
words.

SO let's use this space for marking problems with special
characters and queries. I think good solutions would be:

1. First of all, have to make sure MAPI isn't the problem.

2. Then, could just disallow most of the troubling
characters (should dissallow any character that can't be
part of a filename on either linux or windows)

3. Or, could keep the string in a file instead of AS a
filename. Storying the query as the actual name of a
file feels a little bit dangerous, since it depends on what
file characters the OS supports.

Lastly, we need more specific tests. I just copied my 10
above since they caused a problem, but I should try
them one-at-a-time.