Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 23292
invalid header(s) in notifications mails for changed issues
Last modified: 2003-12-27 10:23:17 UTC
Since the site upgrade, notification mails for changed issues sometimes are missing the subject (at least when read with Mozilla/Netscape). The only pattern I found so far is that the subject is present for newly submitted issues, but absent for issues which were already existent last week. For seeing this, grab any "testing issue" (such as issue 11933), and add a comment. The resulting mail will not contain a subject. Interestingly, in the mailing list archive the subject is present. Looking at the mail sent by IZ, it seems the "Subject" header is (was tried to?) encoded in UTF-8, for instance: Subject: [dba-issues] =?UTF-8?B?W0lzc3VlIDExOTMzXSAgdGVzdGluZyAtIHNvcnJ5IGZvciB0aGUgcw==?= =?UTF-8?B?cGFt?= In real, this should have been "testing - sorry for the spam". I am not sure whether this is a valid encoding above, but the mere fact that the most popular open source mail client (which I claim to be Mozilla :) does not read these mails is a serious issue. No matter whether or not this is actually a problem in Mozilla, I suggest (at least) to not encode subjects as UTF-8 for which this isn't necessary.
update: The problem is due to an invalid header which is sent (so it seems to me) by IT/IZ. Looking at all the mails which are not displayed with a proper subject, they have the following wrong header in common: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: [dba-issues] ... Content-Length: 606 The subject of course varies from mail to mail, but the line "plain; charset=UTF-8" is the same for all messages. This definately is no valid header line, and it seems that this is confusing Mozilla. If I remove the line (or add a space as very first character), everything is displaying fine. In particular, this means that the subject is properly encoded (which I was not sure about :). So though I think the symptom is on Mozilla's side, I think that this invalid header should not be sent by IT.
I tracked this down to what I think is a problem of our corporate IMAP server. In my IMAP inbox, messages appear with invalid headers (which causes various degrees of confusion in Mozilla/Netscape), in an POP3 inbox, everything is fine. Argh!
closing