On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Bernhard Pieber wrote:

> Hi fellow Celestians,
> 
> When fetching my mail I got a debugger because Celeste cannot parse a
> certain message using MailMessage.from:. See the script below to recreate
> the walkback. I am not sure whether this is a bug in Celeste or the message
> string is not valid. I would appreciate any tips on how to best deal with
> this situation.

Not scanning your message (yet), I would bet that there's some oddity in
the message headers. Not necessary a non-conformance, but an oddity. I've
run in to that (with 'Thurs.' in the date field :().

> However, I think the current handling of incorrect messages could be
> improved.

Definitely. No question.

> If Celeste encounters a message it cannot parse it just opens a
> debugger and stops downloading. It does not continue downloading the other
> messages. Even worse, it does not delete the already downloaded messages so
> that if I fetch mail again it downloads them a second time.

Yes. Super yucky.

[snip]
> Of course the question is, what should we do with invalid messages? Just
> throw them away seems not be the best solution. Perhaps they could be filed
> using special IndexFileEntries so that they can be found and dealt with
> later?
[snip]

We probably don't need to split the IndexFileEntry off to handle
this. (MailMessage is actually the place, in any case.) A bit of error
handling and sensible defaults (e.g., having IndexFileEntry>>date trap the
error and return an error string) should do the job, plus filing the
message in a "weird message" category.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.