POP3 charset showstopper?

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  • djn
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2004
    • 140

    POP3 charset showstopper?

    Hi everybody.
    I've just had a fight with the POP3 server on cpanel17, and I still can't understand what it was all about...
    So goes the story:
    1. As always, I log into Neomail, take a look at the stuff there and start deleting everything that has in the subject line more than its fair share of Xs, Ys and other chars from the far side of the alphabet, then start Thunderbird 1.0 and download what's left.
    2. Instead of pulling it all down in minutes, Thunderbird hangs at the ninth mail. Swear, stop the thing, 'get new messages' again, rinse, repeat ... Close it, restart it, same result.
    3. Now I pull out InboxView, which lets me see the message headers and delete one or more message without downloading the thing (handy if somebody mails you a 8 MB joke and you're on dial-up). All my 36 mails are there, it logs in and disconnects quickly as ever, the server seems fine. The messages being in random order, I choose not to delete without first finding out the one messing it up.
    4. Thinking I managed to mess up even a solid piece of open source like the 'Bird, it's now OE6. Starts downloading, hangs at message 9, click Cancel. Being born in Seattle, it says 'OK, just let me finish the current message'. An age later, it admits the server has been silent for 60 seconds, wait or close. Hit the mouse, miss the right button, another 60 seconds seeming like minutes. Of course, close OE, restart, try again, just to be sure ... same as above.
    5. This being me, I just had to see it with my own eyes, so it's telnet into port 110, login, list content, start retrieving messages one by one to see if anything happens. Sure enough, at 'retr 9' the scrolling headers stop at once:
    the tail of the screen ends with

    Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset="

    6. I can read the sender address at the top edge of the telnet window, so I turn to Mozilla, where the Neomail listing is still waiting, open the culprit message into a new tab and stare at the headers looking for something suspicious. Nothing at all, just the same boring email headers as tons of other messages all over the world. The suspect line is just a plain charset="iso-8859-1" not unlike a solid amount of mail I've already got, including two just fresh from the same batch that made it to my PC, so I delete that one message and the rest flows down to me in less than two minutes.

    Now, the mail safely retrieved, I'm still looking at those mail headers in Neomail and can't understand what at all was the matter with it. I'm just being curious. Any hint?
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