Transient fetchmail corruption problem under Windows 2000

[Jason Tishler <jason at tishler dot net>]

[I normally would not post such a vague bug report but since this problem
significantly impacts my mail delivery I hope that I will be allowed some
latitude...]

I am using fetchmail/procmail/mutt to retrieve, process, and read my
email.  I recently changed from using a Windows NT 4.0 SP5 to a Windows
2000 SP1 machine.  Shortly thereafter, I started to notice that some
of the emails that I received with binary attachments were corrupted.

After sending the same message to myself repeatedly and examining the
raw message in an mbox file, I began to see the following pattern.
The corrupted messages are always larger than they should be and there
are chunks of garbage characters in them.  Sometimes the MIME separators
are repeated as if fetchmail shuttered when writing to down the pipe to
procmail (this is probably just a special case of the garbage characters).

Not all messages get corrupted.  A little more half were corrupted --
the others were fine.  I also POP-ed directly into the mail server and
verified that the messages were not corrupt and only became so when I
used fetchmail to retrieve them.

I tried various versions of fetchmail (5.8.12, 5.8.14, 5.8.16) and
Cygwin (1.3.2, my CVS build, latest snapshot).  All exhibit the same
transient binary attachment corruption problem.

When I repeat the same experiments on my old Windows NT 4.0 SP5 machine,
I have not received any corrupted email (yet).

Is anyone using fetchmail under Windows 2000?  If so, are you experience
any problems?

I'm starting to slog through the fetchmail code, straces, and debugging
with gdb.  If anyone has any ideas on the best way to debug this problem
or whether the problem is in fetchmail or Cygwin, I would love to hear
them.

Thanks,
Jason

-- 
Jason Tishler
Director, Software Engineering       Phone: 732.264.8770 x235
Dot Hill Systems Corp.               Fax:   732.264.8798
82 Bethany Road, Suite 7             Email: jason@tishler.net
Hazlet, NJ 07730 USA                 WWW:   http://www.dothill.com

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