Eric Stadtherr wrote:

In light of the recent discussions, I've been browsing through the Trac tickets trying to get a feel for the distribution of bugs (display, database, IMAP interface, etc.). There appear to be quite a few tickets that follow the pattern of "RoundCube exhibits incorrect behavior when displaying an e-mail with <some special characteristics>." These special cases range from message header contents to HTML contents to attachment formats.

I noticed that as well, an a lot of them are very close in description to the point where they could easily be the same issue, or completely different but unless people post sample messages, there is no easy way to be sure.

Instead of trying to fabricate my own e-mail messages that match these special cases (and possible get it wrong), what does everyone think about standing up a "test case" e-mail account on an IMAP server somewhere that people can send these "special case" messages to? The RC development team could then each access this IMAP server from their own RC installations to troubleshoot the handling of the messages.

Elsewhere in this thread I had mentioned coming up with a lot of sample messages in many varying formats. When you take all of the different formats and different clients and think about how many variations there are, the amount of test messages could easily be very large! It would really be nice if every client supported "standards" in the same way. :) See my recent ticket about HTML attachments (#1484178), three different clients I tried formatted the same message three different ways and only one is parsed as expected. Plus I'm sure there are client options that change how some behave in each of these cases as well (inline vs attached files, MIME vs plain text, etc, etc...)

We'd have to keep the login credentials relatively secure, and somebody would have to volunteer an IMAP server.

What does everyone think?

Sounds like a good idea to me. Should there also perhaps be a web form somewhere that would inject messages into the mailbox of said account? It might help people who have trouble forwarding messages as attachments. That could be a security nightmare though.

Alternately, ticket #1484157 could be implemented to have the ability to forward messages as attachments directly from RoundCube. It might also be nice to have an option that would detect whether or not a message is an attached e-mail, and optionally detach it from the e-mail and place it in the current mailbox. In Thunderbird, this is possible with the "Thunderbird Attachment Tools" extension. ( http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext9 but their site is down at the moment.) It can pull an rfc822 message out of an e-mail and into the current folder. Even if you can't do this in RoundCube that extension could still come in handy for tasks like this.

Jim