Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Jul
25.

A few months back we were working with a potential client to do a rather large migration from FirstClass to Google Apps. However, during our pilot we ran into a bug in IMAP. Being a good citizen, we reached out to Open Text Corporation (the company behind First Class) to report the bug. We described the bug and told them how to replicate the bug.

Since we were unable to take on the job due to the bug, we didn’t pay much attention to First Class and assumed that they would fix the bug in the next release.

Last week, we took the time to install a local copy of First Class to see if they had resolved the problem. Unfortunately the bug still remained in the latest version (9.1). Because of that, we thought it might be appropriate to write a brief blog post explaining the bug.

About the bug

The bug is pretty straight forward. It occurs when a message has a subject line that includes one or more quotation marks (“). The problem is not that a quotation mark is an illegal character according to the RFC’s, but rather that FirstClass fails to escape them ( ‘ ” ‘ should be ‘ \” ‘). Because of this, when we issue the FETCH command, it’s impossible to tell where the different different segments of the respond ends.

To put this in a real example, here’s an example of the FETCH response First Class is sending:

212 FETCH (ENVELOPE (“Fri, 30 May 2008 15:11:42 GMT” “Re: Fwd: lorem ipsum “foobar”” ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Repl Repl” NIL “repla” “replace.com”)) ((“Rep Rerpla” NIL “replace” “replace.com”)) NIL NIL ““) RFC822.SIZE 5120 INTERNALDATE “30-May-2008 11:11:42 -0400″ FLAGS (\Seen) UID 89423624)

If this was properly formatted, the response should read:

212 FETCH (ENVELOPE (“Fri, 30 May 2008 15:11:42 GMT” “Re: Fwd: lorem ipsum \”foobar\”” ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Replace Replace” NIL “replacel” “replace.com”)) ((“Repl Repl” NIL “repla” “replace.com”)) ((“Rep Rerpla” NIL “replace” “replace.com”)) NIL NIL ““) RFC822.SIZE 5120 INTERNALDATE “30-May-2008 11:11:42 -0400″ FLAGS (\Seen) UID 89423624)

While you might not consider this a very serious but, it really is. FETCH is a very important feature in IMAP and more emails than you’d imagine includes a quotation mark in the subject line. Let’s just hope Open Text Corporation will have this fixed in the next release.

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