Since mid December 2013 I've had a number of corrupt messages from gmail accounts. All of them seem to have been where there's been an attachment and I've been included in the BCC field, the To field is always empty. Like in the extract below. These messages take a long time to display. When I browse the corrupt messages online they display correctly. It also seems to be a problem in Thunderbird.

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Subject: Subject of Message
From: Name of Sender <nameofsender@gmail.com>
To
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="001a11c1e2d26269f304f0b61027"
Bcc: blindcopyrecipient@somewhere.com


It appears that the corruption occurs because of the missing Colon after the To so that kmail thinks that Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="001a11c1e2d26269f304f0b61027" is part of the message and not the instruction as to how the message should be rendered.

If I edit the message to add a colon after the To like so

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Subject: Subject of Message
From: Name of Sender <nameofsender@gmail.com>
To:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="001a11c1e2d26269f304f0b61027"
Bcc: blindcopyrecipient@somewhere.com


The corruption in the message goes away and the message displays quite quickly.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?
Should I raise it as a Bug and if so with who?

Alex

Yes, please file a bug and attach an (anonymized) message so that developers can use it to diagnose the problem.

I've decided to raise the issue with the Google gmail people as I consider it is their problem. I've given them several examples so they should be able to recreate the bug.

An incorrectly constructed message

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Subject: Test Message
From: First Last <firstlast@gmail.com>
To
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="047d7b6dce8438137a04f1064dc0"
Bcc: firstlast@btinternet.com


and a correctly formatted message after I'd edited it manually using vi. Note the colon after the To

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Subject: Test Message
From: First Last <firstlast@gmail.com>
To:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="047d7b6dce8438137a04f1064dc0"
Bcc: firstlast@btinternet.com


I've also shown that gmail can correctly construct the message if the To field has a receipient like so -

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Subject: Test Message
From: First Last <firstlast@gmail.com>
To: firstlast@btinternet.com
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="047d7b6dce8438137a04f1064dc0"
Bcc: firstlast@btinternet.com


So gmail can get that right! Let's see if they respond to the bug report.

I've recorded it here as a work around to benefit others.


Alex

I got no response from our friends at Google and the problem is not resolved.

You may still want to file a bug on bugs.kde.org to track progress of this issue downstream.