Problem with imapd, netscape 4.x and DU4.0

From: Peter R Bivesand <PetBi_at_UNIT.LiU.SE>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 20:02:01 +0200

Hello fellow managers.

I got a strange problem that we've been trying to solve without any luck.
The setup is as follows:

Hardware: AlphaServer 8200
OS: DigitalUnix 4.0, no patches installed.
Software: University of Washington IMAPD version 10.190, Netscape 4.x any
platform, Pine 3.95 or 3.96.

The problem:
This machine is used as mailserver for our students, we recommend that they
use imap-capable clients due to the fact that they read mail from many
different computers.
When netscape 4.x was released we tried it out and encountered a strange
problem:
You can use netscape to read mail via imap if you don't have a username of
3 or 6 characters. You can read mail via imap with Pine regardless the
lenght of your username. To make things even more confusing; if you use the
same version of the imap-server on another platform (Solaris) it works
perfectly with netscape, even if you have a username of 3 or 6 characters.
I dumped the traffic on the network and found out that when you use
netscape (imap-configuration) and use a 3 or 6 character long username, the
connection is not initiated properly and you get corrupted packets. When
you use a username with a lenght of f.ex. 5 characters the traffic is not
corrupted and it works fine.
A dump of the same experiment conducted with pine shows no problems.

I hope that you all can understand the problem, it's a bit confusing and it
really starts to annoy us. We've tried the same setup on an Alpha-station
running DU 4.0b with no luck. Have you encountered the same problem or do
you know how to solve it?

Thanks in advance!

/Peter R Bivesand
______________________________________________________________________________
Peter R Bivesand System Manager
UNIT Linkoping University
Phone: +46-13-281000 Fax: +46-13-284400
HomePage: http://www.bive.unit.liu.se/~bive/
PGP-key: http://www.bive.unit.liu.se/~bive/.pubkey/
Received on Wed Aug 27 1997 - 21:26:46 NZST

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